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Special Issue: Complex Predicates Introduction

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... Similarly, Alsina et al. (1997) propose that CPrs are multi-headed constructions composing of more than one grammatical event and each of them contributes to the information associated with a head. In a very recent study, Karimi (2013) defines CPrs as structures with more than one element in which each component contributes to the predicate information that is generally encoded in a single verb in a language. ...
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Gilquin (2008, What you think ain’t what you get: Highly polysemous verbs in mind and language. In Jean-Remi Lapaire, Guillaume Desagulier & Jean-Baptiste Guignard (eds.), From gram to mind: Grammar as cognition , 235–255. Bordeaux: Presse Universitaires de Bordeaux) reported that light uses of verbs (e.g. make use ) tend to outnumber concrete uses of the same verbs (e.g. make furniture ) in corpora, whereas concrete senses tend to outnumber light senses in responses to elicitation tests. The differences between corpus frequency and cognitive salience remain an important and much-discussed question (cf. Arppe et al. 2010, Cognitive corpus linguistics: Five points of debate on current theory and methodology. Corpora 5(1). 1–27). The question is particularly complicated because both corpus frequency and cognitive salience are difficult to define, and are often left undefined. Operationalising and defining corpus frequencies are the issues at the heart of the present paper, which includes a close, manual semantic analysis of nearly 6,000 instances of three polysemous verbs with light and concrete uses, make, take , and give , in the British component of the International Corpus of English. The paper compares semasiological frequencies like those measured by Gilquin (2008) to onomasiological frequency measurements (cf. Geeraerts 1997, Diachronic prototype semantics: A contribution to historical lexicology . Oxford: Clarendon Press). Methodologically, the paper demonstrates that these approaches address fundamentally different research questions, and offer dramatically different results. Findings indicate that corpus frequencies in speech may correlate with elicitation test results, if the corpus frequencies are measured onomasiologically rather than semasiologically; I refer to Geeraerts’s (2010, Theories of lexical semantics . Oxford: Oxford University Press) hypothesis of onomasiological salience in explaining this observation.
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This study employs corpus semantic techniques to examine the semantics of light verbs and light verb constructions (LVCs) in Singapore English, Hong Kong English, and British English via their respective components in the International Corpus of English (ICE; Greenbaum 1996). The study investigates onomasiological variation (cf. Geeraerts et al. 1994) by identifying selection preferences in natural use between light verb constructions and their related verb alternates. In addition, identity evidence is forwarded as a valuable corpus semantic tool, in which instances of naturally occurring language data resemble classic identity tests for polysemy. Via a close reading and manual semantic analysis of thousands of instances of light make, take, give, and their semantic alternates, this study finds remarkable consistency across the three varieties of World Englishes (WEs) in onomasiological preferences, even in extremely nuanced features of LVCs. Onomasiological evidence and identity evidence also suggest the new finding that the three light verbs and their constructions exhibit degrees of lightness, and that these degrees of lightness are extremely consistent across regional varieties.
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This article investigates the syntactic and semantic properties of complex predicates in Persian in order to isolate the individual contributions of the verbal components. The event structure of causative alternation and unergative verbs is determined, based on a decomposition of the verbal construction into primitive syntactic elements consisting of lexical roots and functional heads, with the latter projecting all arguments of the verbal construction. An analysis is provided whereby the argument structure is not projected from the lexicon but is formed compositionally by the conjunction of the primitive components of the complex predicate in syntax. The dual behaviour of Persian complex predicates as lexical and syntactic elements, which has been attested in Persian literature on light verb constructions, follows naturally from the analysis proposed since there is no strict division between the level of word formation and the component manipulating phrasal constructs.
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This is a revised and updated version of Butt (2003), which noted that the study of light verbs and complex predicates is fraught with dangers and misunderstandings that go beyond the merely terminological. This chapter thus attempts to provide some clarity by addressing how light verbs and complex predicates can be identified cross-linguistically, what the relationship between the two is and whether light verbs must always be associated with uniform syntactic and semantic properties. Based primarily on both diachronic and synchronic evidence from the South Asian language Urdu, but also by taking cross-linguistic patterns into account, this chapter attempts to pull together the relevant available knowledge in order to arrive at a more definitive understanding of light verbs. Jespersen (1965, Volume VI: 117) is generally credited with first coining the term light verb, which he applied to English V+NP constructions as in (I). (I) have a rest, a read, a cry, a think take a sneak, a drive, a walk, a plunge give a sigh, a shout, a shiver, a pull, a ring The intuition behind the term ‘light’ is that although these constructions respect the standard verb complement schema in English, the verbs take, give, etc., cannot be said to be predicating fully. That is, one does not actually physically ‘take’ a ‘plunge’ but rather one ‘plunges’. The verbs therefore seem to be more of a verbal licenser for nouns.
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Persian complex predicates pose an interesting challenge for theoretical linguistics since they have both word-like and phrase-like properties. For example, they can feed derivational processes, but they are also separable by the future auxiliary or the negation prefix. Various proposals have been made in the literature to capture the nature of Persian complex predicates, among them analyses that treat them as purely phrasal or purely lexical combinations. Mixed analyses that analyze them as words by default and as phrases in the non-default case have also been suggested. In this paper, I show that theories that rely exclusively on the classification of patterns in inheritance hierarchies cannot account for the facts in an insightful way unless they are augmented by transformations or some similar device. I then show that a lexical account together with appropriate grammar rules and an argument composition analysis of the future auxiliary has none of the shortcomings that classification-based analyses have and that it can account for both the phrasal and the word-like properties of Persian complex predicates.
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The nature of preverbal nominals and their relation to the verb have been the focus of much debate in languages with a productive complex predication process. For Persian, certain analyses have argued that the bare nominals in complex predicate constructions are distinct from bare objects, while others have treated the two types of bare nominals uniformly. This paper argues that the two categories of preverbal nouns cannot receive the same analysis since they display distinct syntactic and semantic behavior: the preverbal nominals, unlike the bare object nouns, cannot be questioned, are modified differently, have different interpretations, give rise to distinct case-assignment contexts, and can co-occur with a non-specific object. The distinct properties of the two nominal categories are captured by positing distinct structural positions for these nouns. Non-specific bare nouns are internal arguments of the thematic verb, while the nominal element of the complex predicate construction is part of the verbal domain with which it combines through a process of conflation, as defined in Hale and Keyser (2002), to form a single predicate.
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This article argues that the syntax of the word is distinct and informationally encapsulated from the syntax of phrases, and that this is responsible for a series of basic and robust effects. It also provides a careful criticism of the assumptions and analyses of a particular version of the Distributed Morphology view, showing that they cannot actually avoid the distinction between word-level and phrase-level syntax. Lexical Hypothesis suggests that the system of words in a language is independent of the system of phrases in a language in a particular way. The arguments against the Lexical Hypothesis consist in showing that there is some slippage between the different notions of word. The clitic/affix distinction under this hypothesis is addressed. © 2007 editorial matter and organization Gillian Ramchand and Charles Reiss the chapters their various authors. All rights reserved.
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Most of Persian complex predicates are N + V combinations in which the Ns refer to an action or a process and Vs seem, though semantically bleached and lacking a-structure of their own, to possess aspectual features. In this paper, we argue that the aspetual features of Persian light verbs represented in an aspectual tier combine with semantic properties of Ns and form complex predicates which like simple lexical verbs predicate grammatical clauses. We claim that N + V complex predicates are compositionally formed in the lexicon. This means light verbs select Ns whose arguments are licensed to play syntactic roles after they are selected by the light verbs.
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While complex predicate constructions, including light verb structures and verb serialisation, are found in many of the world's languages, there has been little diachronic work on these structures to date. In this paper I survey the state of the field and describe current ideas on the origins and development of complex predicates. In particular, I show that the assumption of cline-like development from parataxis to affix (through serialisation, light verbs and auxiliation) is too simplistic. Finally, I review arguments in favor of and against views of light verbs as stable structures.
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  This paper argues that clause union/restructuring constructions such as verb clusters in German do not involve head clustering in the form of (lexical or derived) complex head formation. I provide several arguments showing that clause union properties are licensed in the absence of complex head formation and that complex head formation hence cannot be seen as a condition on clause union/restructuring. Complex head approaches are compared to syntactic complementation approaches—in particular, to an approach where the verbs of a restructuring construction project independent VPs that include all the internal arguments associated with the particular verbs. A series of empirical facts are considered (constituency, word order, modification, event structure properties, and nominalizations) that all point to the conclusion that these constructions involve regular VPs rather than complex V-V heads. Although it is not excluded that complex head approaches could be adjusted to accommodate these facts, the main advantage of the VP-complementation approach is that the sum of the properties discussed follows without additional assumptions from the structure suggested and that this approach also correctly predicts which constructions are excluded.
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  In this paper, I introduce a novel ellipsis construction from Farsi, v-stranding VPE, in which part of a complex predicate goes missing, leaving behind the light verb. Under an analysis of complex predicates where the light verb is the overt realization of v, this type of ellipsis can be construed as deletion of the complement of v. I give evidence that this phenomenon patterns with English verb phrase ellipsis (VPE) in a number of important respects. The same licensing conditions that must be satisfied in English VPE, including an inflectional checking requirement and an antecedence condition, must also be satisfied in Farsi v-stranding VPE.
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A syntactic account of light verb phenomena in Japanese is proposed in preference to Grimshaw and Mester's (1988) argument transfer account. A close examination of the suru construction (in which the light verb suru occurs with a verbal noun) suggests that the argument transfer account cannot explain certain facts of this construction (e.g., transfer of adjuncts). In addition, contrary to a previous assumption, many verbs other than suru - all raising or control verbs — exhibit the crucial properties of a light verb. Light verb properties of these raising and control verbs can be explained once these light verb constructions are recognized as raising or control constructions, in which the verbal noun heads a syntactic predicative complement of these verbs. In the proposed analysis, transferred arguments are syntactically displaced out of the predicative complement, as is generally possible with raising/ control constructions. This view, together with independently motivated Japanese phrase structure rules, accounts for all the light verb properties of those verbs without any special mechanism such as Argument Transfer. This analysis can also be extended to suru, which can function as a control verb. An LFG analysis incorporating this idea is proposed, utilizing the notion of Functional Uncertainty.
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This paper contrasts two families of approaches to certain affixal verb constructions in Japanese, with particular emphasis on the ’potential’ construction. Scope facts in this construction have been offered as support for complex predicate analyses, in which there is no syntactic constituent consisting of the object and lower verb, to the exclusion of the potential head -rare. We provide a variety of arguments, primarily from aspectual modification properties, which strongly challenge this family of approaches and favor instead VP-complementation approaches in which the potential head selects a thematically complete VP complement. Finally, we show how the scope facts may be accommodated on such a viewpoint, drawing connections to similar properties with other restructuring configurations cross-linguistically.
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In this paper, we focus on a group of the Kurdish, Korean and Persian Light Verb Constructions (LVCs); consisting of a semantically light verb (LV) and a verbal noun (VN). It is argued that the LVs, capable of case marking and hosting verbal features, in combination with T function either as nominative and accusative case markers or only as nominative case markers. It is shown that the arguments of VNs can be structurally licensed via T and LV whose case assigning roles are not thematically restricted. Although these LVs as the most thematically bleached natural verbs seem very similar to v in the Minimalist Program, the way they are analyzed in this work indicates that the LVs can not support the notion of v(P) as a head above VP in a clause.