Support verbs that are not verbs

Eric Laporte, Jeesun Nam, Jeannot Fils Ranaivoson, Takuya Nakamura

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Eric Laporte, Jeesun Nam, Jeannot Fils Ranaivoson, Takuya Nakamura. Support verbs that are not verbs. Language Sciences, 2025, 111, pp.101741. 10.1016/j.langsci.2025.101741. hal-05132407

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# Support verbs that are not verbs

Eric Laporte<fnref n="1" />, Jeesun Nam<fnref n="2" />, Jeannot Fils Ranaivoson<fnref n="3" /> & Takuya Nakamura⁴

*In memory of Laurence Danlos (1952-2024), Jacques Labelle (1937-2025) and Béatrice Lamiroy (1952-2025)*

## Abstract

In support verb constructions (SVC), as *have poise*, the support verb is explicitly assumed to be a verb, here *have*. However, during the last 50 years, the notion of SVC has been extended to a large range of new cases. With this new scope, the linguistic form that plays the role of the support verb can also be an expression not classified as a verb, such as *be mad with*, or an adjective, e.g. 있다 *issta* 'there is' in Korean.

Calling 'support verb' a non-verb is a terminological issue. Beyond that, this article examines the validity of extending the definition of SVCs. After surveying the linguistic forms at stake and the reactions to such extension, we focus on delimiting the historical, *stricto sensu* SVCs based on criteria, in a way that matches the traditional intuition. Then, for each type of linguistic form proposed as an extension, we examine how far the extension distorts this notion. We find both SVCs and extensions of SVC to be of interest in a model of syntax and the lexicon. Finally, the 'verb' part of speech is not essential to any of the categories, which suggests adopting the terms of 'support construction' and 'extension of support construction' instead.

## Keywords

Support verb, light verb, aspect, modality, causation, adjective.

In support verb constructions (SVC), as *have poise*, the support verb is explicitly assumed to be a verb. However, during the last 50 years, the notion of SVC has been extended to a large range of new cases, and with this new scope, the linguistic form that plays the role of the support verb is, strictly speaking, not always a verb, like *have*. It may also be an expression not classified as a verb, such as *be mad with* in the phrase *be mad with jealousy*, or an adjective, e.g. 있다 *issta* 'there is' in Korean—a language where some clauses have a main adjective, not a main verb. Calling 'support verb' a non-verb is a terminological issue. Beyond that, we would like to examine the validity of extending the definition of SVCs.

SVCs are also known as 'light verb constructions' and as 'composite predicates' (Cattell, 1984), but the notion is basically the same. In this paper, we use concepts that are common to the main linguistic theories that embraced the notion of SVC: Corpus Linguistics (e.g. Storrer, 2007), Lexicon-Grammar (e.g. Garcia-Vega, Machonis, 2014), Generative Grammar (e.g. Diesing, 1998), Meaning-Text theory (Mel'čuk, 2005), Construction Grammar (e.g. Kotsyba, 2014), and we pay attention to the impact of theoretical options on natural language processing as well.

In the first section, we give an overview and a typology of the linguistic forms at stake. The second

<footnote>1, 4 LIGM, Univ Gustave Eiffel, CNRS, France</footnote>

<footnote n="2">² DICORA/ Department of Linguistics and Cognitive Science, HUFS, South Korea</footnote>

<footnote n="3">³ CIRAM, University of Antananarivo, Madagascar</footnote>

<footnote n="1">¹ eric.laporte@univ-eiffel.fr (corresponding author), ² jeesun.nam@gmail.com,</footnote>

<footnote n="3">³ jeannot.fils@gmail.com, ⁴ takuya.nakamura@univ-eiffel.fr</footnote>
section surveys the reaction of the research community to the extension of the notion of SVC. The third
section delves deeper into the intuition and historical delimitation of stricto sensu SVCs. The fourth
section discusses whether the extension is of interest in a model of syntax and the lexicon, and whether
the original notion and the extension can be just merged into one category. The conclusion sums up our
findings and draws consequences on terminology and future research.

**1. Survey of relevant forms**

According to a widespread definition, “SVC, also known as *light-verb constructions*, are multiword
expressions combining a verb and a predicative noun,<fnref n="1" /> [where] the verb [does not] contribute its full
meaning to the construction” (Cap et al., 2015:19), since it has lost its meaning as a full verb. We will
call this usage of the term the traditional definition of SVC. It remains essentially similar to that of
Jespersen (1942: 117), except that Jespersen considered only the cases where the combination of the
support verb with the noun predicate, e.g. *have an aim*, is equivalent to a verb, here *aim*.<fnref n="2" /> Examples of
cases with or without an equivalent verb are *have poise / an aim / balance / excitement / a flu / a glance
/ a goal / an idea / love, make a joke / order / sound / study, do an operation / takeover, there be chaos
/ a quake, give a snort, pay homage / a visit, shed tears, take a poke*. The predicative noun (or noun
predicate)<fnref n="3" /> is the central item of a predicate/argument structure (Gross, 1981: 11-12), and as such it
determines and selects the arguments, as in the following sentences:

(1) *John made a study of French start-ups*

(2) *This phone made a sound*

The noun *study* takes two arguments: a human agent (here *John*) and a patient (*French start-ups*), while the noun *sound* takes only an argument (*phone*): a cause, which may be human or non-human.<fnref n="4" /> According to this analysis of (1) and (2), a noun serves as the main predicate<fnref n="5" /> of the sentence: as this idea may seem unconventional to some linguists, we will go back to this point in Section 3.2.

The two terms ‘support verb’ and ‘light verb’ do not actually contrast with each other. Only ‘light verb’ was in use from 1942 (Jespersen) to 1977. From the introduction of the term ‘support’ (Gross, 1977: 218) to roughly 2000, Generative Grammar tended to use ‘light verb’ more than other frameworks (e.g. Cattell, 1984), while ‘support verb’ was often associated with the application of verifiable criteria (cf. Section 3). Since then, these terminological tendencies have blurred.<fnref n="6" />

The notion of support verb extends naturally to quasi-synonyms. Many support verbs have quasi-
synonyms, often with a stylistic, connotative or expressive effect or a difference of register, as in *have
poise / possess poise, have excitement / experience excitement / feel excitement, do an operation /
perform an operation*. Such shades are ‘light’ enough that these quasi-synonyms are considered as
support verbs as well (Fasciolo, 2022). However, during the last 50 years, the notion of SVC has been
extended to a much larger range of new cases, which go beyond the traditional definition. In this section,
we briefly survey these new cases. The survey is organised according to two dimensions: first, the

<footnote n="1">¹ Here, ‘predicative’ refers to the logical sense of the term ‘predicate’, i.e. a linguistic element with a (possibly empty) set of arguments, like ‘predicator’ in Lyons (1977, vol.2: 434) and ‘semantic predicate’ in Gross (1981: 9). Some authors use ‘predicational noun’ in the same sense (De Kuthy, 2001). This is distinct from the concept of ‘predicate’ in traditional grammar as ‘the part of a sentence that is not the subject’.</footnote>

<footnote n="2">² The extension to ‘standalone’ combinations, i.e. combinations without a verbal equivalent, e.g. *have a goal* (Labelle, 1974: 6; Gross, 1981: 17), is now consensual.</footnote>

<footnote n="3">³ The term of ‘light verb’ has also been applied to verbs that combine with another verb, contributing an aspectual meaning (Poornima, Koenig, 2009: 278; Butt, 2010: 4), i.e. to auxiliary verbs, as in *John finished to copy the score*. But this intersection between ‘light verb’ and ‘auxiliary verb’ is not in use for the term of ‘support verb’: an auxiliary combines with a verb, while a support verb combines with a non-verbal predicate. Some verbs combine with both, e.g. *John finished to make the copy of the score / John finished the copy of the score*, but as this can be accounted for with a removal of the support verb *make*, we will consider such verbs as auxiliaries.</footnote>

<footnote n="4">⁴ Several linguists also extend the *stricto sensu* definition to combinations of a support verb with a predicative adjective, such as *be hungry* (Gross, 1981: 11; Cattell, 1984: chap. 5; Danlos, 1992: 18), or with a frozen prepositional phrase, such as *be at stake* (Gross, 1981: 30). In this article, we will cite almost only examples with noun predicates, but the phenomena are mostly the same with predicative elements that are neither verbs nor nouns.</footnote>

<footnote n="5">⁵ Recall that we use the term ‘predicate’ in its logical sense (cf. Footnote 1).</footnote>

<footnote n="6">⁶ For instance, Abeillé & Godard (2006) use ‘support verb’ without citing such criteria, while Samvelian et al. (2014) use ‘light verb’ and apply the criteria.</footnote>
syntactic-semantic categories conveyed by the support verbs, and then the morphosyntactic diversity of the constructions. As regards syntactic-semantic categories, we limit the survey to constructions for which we found in the literature inventories of noun predicates occurring in them, leaving aside, for example, mirative constructions (cf. maybe Fleischhauer, Neisani, 2019: 71). We leave aside stylistic effects as well, because we classify them as quasi-synonymy.

## 1.1. Aspect

Many SVCs have variants that introduce aspectual shades, as in *have a glance / cast a glance*, “where *cast* highlights the quickness (punctual aspect?) of the gesture: it adds a particular aspect to the sentence with *have* (...). This is one of the key points about relations involving operator verbs:<fnref n="7" /> the interplay of aspects” (Labelle, 1974: 9). Other verbs introduce phasal aspects, i.e. begin, continuation, duration, end, repetition... (Gross, 1981: 33; Gross, 1982: 305), as in *get poise* (inchoative) and *lose poise* (cessative) as variants of *have poise*. Phasal aspects are a more substantial contribution, to the point that these phrases do not match the traditional definition.

## 1.2. Intensity and modality

Intensive and quantitative variants (Gross, 1992: 712), as in *radiate poise*, and modal variants (Ranchhod, 1983: 333), as in *lack poise* or *do a takeover / attempt a takeover* (Meyers et al., 2004: 97), have been mentioned<fnref n="8" />.

## 1.3. Causation

Verbs such as *give* may introduce an extra causative argument (Gross, 1981: 24-28; Ranchhod, 1983: 333):

(3) *The car has poise and balance*

(4) *The new design gives the car poise and balance*

In (3), *poise* has a single argument, *car*, which occurs in (4) too, and (4) contains the additional argument *design* playing a causative role. This situation is different from the preceding ones, as the contribution of the verb is substantial.

## 1.4. Diathesis

Sometimes, an alternative SVC expresses a different diathesis, in a sentence with the same meaning, but that assigns the arguments of the predicate to different syntactic positions (Gross, 1981: 23, 26, 40-41; Gross, 1989; Langer, 2005: 197):

(5) *My boyfriend made a call to a lawyer*

(6) *A lawyer received a call from my boyfriend*

The agent, *boyfriend*, is the subject in (5), but is the prepositional complement in (6). The only semantic difference is that (6) is more focused on the goal argument, *lawyer*. However, *receive* seems to contribute its “full meaning”, so it does not clearly qualify as a ‘pure’ support verb.

## 1.5. Part of speech of the support

The previous examples illustrated support verbs conveying syntactic-semantic categories. Several authors extend SVCs according to another dimension: morphosyntactic diversity. In the prototypical structure of (1) or (5), the support verb is transitive and the noun predicate is its direct object. In languages like Korean and Malagasy, we observe another morphosyntactic configuration:

(7) 민우가 용기가 있다
minwu-ka yongki-ka iss-ta
Minu-NOM courage-NOM there_be-DECL
‘Minu has courage.’

In (7), the noun *yongki* ‘courage’ determines the arguments and selects the agent. These features motivate an analysis of the noun as the main predicate of the sentence (see Section 4.5 for further

<footnote n="7">⁷ Labelle (1974: 6) uses the term of ‘operator verb’, with a reference to Harris (1968), but in “a restricted sense, i.e. that of a verbal operator, allowing any noun to play the part of a verb, as in (*have* + *make* + *set up*) *an appointment*.” Labelle (1983) shifts to the term of ‘support verb’.</footnote>

<footnote n="8">⁸ However, *attempt* also combines with verbs, e.g. in *Incarcerated juveniles attempted to do a takeover of a detention center*. In consequence, *attempt* is better classified as an auxiliary. The expression *attempt a takeover* can be accounted for with a removal of the support verb *do*.</footnote>
discussion of this point). Consequently, the word 있다 *issta* 'there is' is to be analysed as a support in the most traditional sense. But 있다 *issta* happens to have both verbal and adjectival properties (Seo, 1990: 463-466). It is worth dwelling a bit here on the verb/adjective distinction in Korean. In this language, like in many others in the world, some clauses have a main adjective, not a main verb; and an adjective can act as the main predicate of a sentence without a copula, as in (8):

(8) 민우가 기쁘다
minwu-ka kippu-ta
Minu-NOM happy-DECL
'Minu is happy.'

This fact induces much more similarity between adjectives and verbs in Korean than in English, where adjectives and verbs always occupy quite different morphosyntactic positions. To distinguish adjectives from verbs in Korean, linguists resort to several features, which sometimes conflict with one another (Choe, 2005). In other words, there is some kind of an adjective/verb continuum. However, it is not always satisfactory to represent the adjective/verb contrast simply as a continuum, for instance when building lexical databases for natural language processing: such projects require a definite criterion of distinction. Depending on the criterion, some authors classify 있다 *issta* as a verb (Sung, 1976; Choe, 2005) or as an adjective (Choi, 1929; Nam, 1996; Chung, 1998: 1). Hence, Nam (1996: 49) and Chung (1998: 27) term 있다 *issta* in (7) as a 'support adjective'.

In addition to 있다 *issta*, Nam (1996: 20-24) mentions two adjectives serving as supports with noun predicates, 담다 *tap-ta* 'worthy of the name of' and 같다 *kath-ta* 'look like':

(9) 이 그림은 예술적 작품답다
i kulim-un yeyswulcek cakphwum-tap-ta
this painting-NOM artistic work-worthy_of_the_name-DECL
'This painting is worthy of the name of artwork.'

We can identify the semantic contribution of this adjective by comparing (9) with (10), where it is replaced by the copula for nouns, 이다 *ita*:

(10) 이 그림은 예술적 작품이다
i kulim-un yeyswulcek cakphwum-i-ta
this painting-NOM artistic work-be-DECL
'This painting is an artwork.'

Substituting the adjective 담다 *tap-ta* 'worthy of the name of' for the copula introduces a modal meaning, as in the examples of Section 1.2.

In Japanese, adjectives are morphologically distinguished from verbs through the suffix used when they are the main predicate of an assertive sentence in the present tense, -u for verbs and -i for adjectives. With the noun predicate yūki 'courage', the verb aru 'there is' seems to be a support verb:

(11) 太郎に 勇気が ある
tarō-ni yūki-ga ar-u
Taro-LOC courage-NOM there_be-PRS
'Taro has courage.'

The negation of aru 'there is' is the adjective nai 'there is not':

(12) 太郎に 勇気が ない
tarō-ni yūki-ga na-i
Taro-LOC courage-NOM there_not_be-PRS
'Taro has no courage.'

This adjective can therefore be considered a negative extension of the support verb. But the extension of this phenomenon in the lexicon remains to be investigated.

Support adjectives occur in Malagasy as well (Ranaivoson, 1996: 139; Hanitramalala, 2017: 154-162). We return to this topic in Section 4.5. It is not known whether support adjectives are an isolated phenomenon or part of a broader typological pattern. Many other languages can have a clause with a main adjective instead of a main verb, e.g. Arabic, Chinese, Russian and Turkish, and we are not aware of support adjectives being reported in these languages, but this may be because no prior research has systematically investigated their presence yet: an absence of evidence is not an evidence of absence.
## 1.6. Syntactic position of the noun predicate

With some verbs, the noun predicate occupies a prepositional position (Labelle, 1974: 9; Ranchhod, 1983: 327):

(13) *One of the children has a flu*

(14) *One of the children suffers from a flu*

A support verb can even be replaced by an expression not classified as a verb (Gross, 1988: 15; Sklavounou, 1994: 515):

(15) *The couch has some wear*

(16) *The couch shows signs of some wear*

In (16), the expression *show signs of*, which substitutes the support verb *have* of (15), contains a verb but also a noun. Understandably, Andriamise et al. (2014) term such an expression as a 'support expression'.

In the following pair, the expression *be mad with* is an intensive variant of *feel*:

(17) *I felt jealousy*

(18) *I was mad with jealousy*

In (18), we do not call *mad* a support adjective: as opposed to (7) and (12), the expression that substitutes *feel* here is the complete phrase *be mad with*, including *be*, so the adjective *mad* does not serve as support on its own.

In some constructions, the noun predicate occupies the position of the subject of the support verb (Gross, 1992: 712). Compare the following sentences:

(19) *There was a quake in San Francisco*

(20) *A quake struck San Francisco*

In (19), the noun predicate *quake* elects the locative argument *San Francisco*. In the expressive variant (20), which focuses on the predicate, the argument occurs in the form of a direct complement.

All these phenomena produce a rich diversity of constructions occurring frequently in texts. Linguists that investigated these constructions usually describe them as 'extensions of SVC', and the corresponding verbs as 'extensions of support verbs'. Does that distort the *stricto sensu* notion of SVC, or 'pure' SVC?

## 2. Extending the notion of SVC: previous work

A number of linguists investigated into some of the forms surveyed above, and their findings support the extension of the notion of SVC. The focus of these studies depends on the theoretical frameworks. Generative Grammar studies discuss arborescent representations of extended SVCs (e.g. Diesing, 1998). Corpus linguists often compare extended SVCs with morphologically related full verbs, or analyse the lexical aspects they convey (e.g. Matsumoto, 1999: 70; Storrer, 2007: 167; Mastrofini, 2023). For Lexicon-Grammar, the first task is to present an exhaustive survey of the relevant facts, scanning the lexicon for examples and counter-examples; doing so, authors test operational criteria of being pure or extended SVCs (e.g. Garcia-Vega, Machonis, 2014: 120-122). Constructionist works investigate the relations between semantic features of support verbs and of predicative nouns (e.g. Kotsyba, 2014: 268; Eshaghi, Karimi-Doostan, 2023: 74; Pompei, Piunno, 2023: 131). Meaning-Text Theory calls extended support verbs 'lexical functions' and explores their selection by noun predicates (e.g. Samvelian et al., 2014: 210). Lexical Functional Grammar discusses whether aspectual and causative features of extended SVCs come from the support verb or from the predicative noun (e.g. Butt, 2019: 5).

There is no unanimity on the perimeter of the extension, but we are not aware of linguists that would have challenged any of the extensions listed in the preceding section. The least studied one is support adjectives. Their existence has been reported in Korean and Malagasy, and it would be interesting to know if they are found also in other languages where a clause can have a main adjective instead of a main verb, e.g. Arabic, Chinese, Japanese, Russian or Turkish, but support adjectives remain otherwise strikingly absent from the literature. Reputed manuals of grammar in various languages maintain the traditional definition of pure SVCs (e.g. Neves, 2000). However, Abeillé & Godard (2021, vol. 1: 343-355) mentions all extensions, except support adjectives, which do not occur in French.

These linguistic phenomena have implications on natural language processing (NLP). The community of NLP got massively interested in SVC about 25 years ago (e.g. Cap et al., 2015:19). This community often retains the traditional definition, but there are exceptions. For example, among the constructions exemplified above, Langer (2005) mentions those SVC that introduce an aspectual
meaning, a causative argument, or a different diathesis, and those where a preposition precedes the noun predicate. However, he does not touch on those where the support is an adjective or a several-word expression, or where the noun predicate is the subject of the support verb. Meyers et al. (2004) and Meyers (2007: 62) make a similar selection among these phenomena, including constructions where the noun predicate is the subject of the support verb, but excluding those with a causative argument. The PARSEME guidelines for annotation of SVCs in corpora (Ramisch et al., 2020) retains only causative extensions and cases where a preposition precedes the noun predicate. The findings of these authors on extended SVCs have already affected, and may affect more in the future, lexical databases and algorithms used in parsers, translation tools and annotators. We return to this topic in Section 4.9.

How can we deal with all these constructions? Is it judicious to assimilate them to SVCs? If not, what alternative solutions are available? To answer these questions, we will try to identify better the core notion of SVC, and to assess how well each of the extensions really matches it. Which of the features of pure SVCs are fully relevant and make these constructions different from others? To what extent do the extensions share these features? In the next section, we look in more detail into pure SVCs. In particular, we reconsider the definition of pure SVC with a focus on distinctive criteria, so that the observation of these features is likely to give reliable results and can be scaled to a large number of lexical entries.

## 3. Previous work about how to recognise a *stricto sensu* SVC

### 3.1. Intuitive features

Among the traditional definitional features of SVC, the most cited three (e.g. Cap et al., 2015:19) are largely a matter of intuition.

(i) A support verb is supposed to be semantically ‘light’. The problem with this feature is that even in *stricto sensu* SVC, semantic weight is a continuum where observers’ appreciation does not necessarily agree:

(21) *John made a joke*

(22) *John gave Mary a hug*

In (21), does *make* denote that joking is a creative act? In (22), does *give* contribute to denoting a trajectory (Pompei, 2023: 159)? The observation of lightness is compromised by an epistemological deadlock: the semantic weight of the verb can only be relevantly checked in the context of the construction; unfortunately, in that context, no experiment allows for verifiably locating the meaning, i.e. separating the meaning conveyed by the verb from that of the rest of the construction. And no operational criterion of lightness is known.

(ii) Another definitional feature of SVCs, called ‘bleaching’, is that the support verb has lost its meaning as a full verb. Indeed, support verbs have properties of grammatical words, and most are the outcome of a grammaticalization process. But bleaching is close to lightness, and poses the same observational challenges: in (21) and (22), have *make* and *give* completely lost their meanings as full verbs? Moreover, some support verbs have diachronically lost their meaning as a full verb in all their uses, e.g. *pratiquer* ‘practise’, *perpêtrer* ‘perpetrate’, *commettre* ‘commit’ in French (Abeillé, 1988: 11), or *foreta* ‘make’ in Norwegian (Ulland, 2014). In order to assess bleaching, we may have to search for the meaning of the verb as a full verb in the past: therefore, the notion of SVC would depend on the diachrony of the language, and cease to be a purely synchronic notion. This problem occurs in the notable case of the copula *be* and its equivalent in other languages, because it is difficult to spot their meaning as a full verb (cf. footnote 5).

(iii) A support verb has no argument structure: the main semantic predicate in an SVC is supposed to be located somewhere out of the support verb, typically in a noun: for example, the predicate/argument structure of (22) can be represented by the formula *hug*(John, Mary). Here again, assigning a predicate/argument structure to a sentence is a subjective problem. For example, Meyers et al. (2004: 97) do analyse the support verb as an additional predicate on top of the noun predicate: ‘In all cases of support verbs, an argument is shared between a higher predicate $P_1$ and a lower predicate $P_2$ such that the phrase headed by $P_2$ is an argument of $P_1$’.

All three features are relatively fuzzy in the sense of Laporte (2018). This reflects the fact that there is a continuum between SVCs and constructions with a full verb (Samvelian et al., 2014). However, several theoretical frameworks are based on disjoint categories and require discretised models of linguistic reality. This is also the case of lexical databases used in NLP. Within such contexts, we cannot
be content with noting the existence of a continuum. Sure, less formal theories can handle a continuum, but even so, when a definition uses fuzzy features, observers inevitably disagree on the position of an example on the continuum, and as a result, the notion of SVC is vague. Thus, we will now turn to more clear-cut definitional features, namely, criteria based on linguistic forms and variants, devised in order to base analyses on verifiable, reproducible observations. We will recall three criteria that most reliably identify the notion of *stricto sensu* SVC.

## 3.2. Argument selection

The first criterion involves the selection of arguments by a semantic predicate. At the core of the notion of support verb is the idea that a noun may serve as the main predicate within a sentence, and even as its only predicate. This idea emerged only in the 20th century and may seem unconventional to some linguists, who would analyse the verb *make* as the predicate in sentences (1) and (2), repeated here for convenience:

(1) *John made a study of French start-ups*

(2) *This phone made a sound*

Precisely, let us briefly dwell on the ‘legacy’ analysis that assumes *make* to be the main predicate and the selector of the arguments in sentences (1)-(2), and let us extend our investigation to the following examples from Machonis (1991):

(23) *She made an analysis of the data*

(24) *The lion made a roar*

(25) *The car made a skid*

The predicate/argument structure of (1) would be represented by the formula *make(John, study)*, that of (2) by *make(phone, sound)*, etc. Sentences (1)-(2) and (23)-(25) provide a sample of subjects and direct objects selected by the supposed predicate *make*. If we systematically combine the selected subjects with the selected direct objects, we observe that some combinations do not make sense and are not in use:

(26) *(She + *This phone + *The lion + *The car) made a study of French start-ups**

(27) *(She + This phone + The lion + The car) made a sound*

(28) *(She + ?This phone + *The lion + ?The car) made an analysis of the data*

(29) *(She + This phone + The lion + The car) made a roar*

(30) *(She + *This phone + *The lion+ The car) made a skid*

The analysis where (1)-(2) and (23)-(25) share the same verbal predicate is at odds with these distributional restrictions. A predicate should combine with any subject it selects and any direct object it selects. Since this is not the case here, these subjects and objects are not only selected by the supposed verbal predicate, but also by each other. In other words, if we assume that *make* is the selector of the arguments in (1)-(2) and (23)-(25), we have to admit that there are additional selectional restrictions between the arguments. Therefore, this analysis conflicts with a fundamental property of predicate/argument structure: the predicate selects each argument independently. When it has several arguments, any possible value of an argument at least makes sense with any possible value of another.

The restrictions in (26)-(30) suggest an alternative analysis: the predicates in (1)-(2) and (23)-(25) would be *study*, *sound*, *analysis*, *roar* and *skid*, and we could represent the predicate/argument structure of (1) by *study(John, start-ups)*, that of (2) by *sound(phone)*, etc. With this analysis, the restrictions in (26)-(30) become consistent with the notion that each noun predicate selects the subject of the sentence. Let us now test this new analysis by conducting the same experiment as above. In (1), if the selector of the arguments is *study*, it has two arguments: the possible subjects are *John* or any human, and the possible objects are *start-ups* or any topic of study. A distributional investigation shows that any combination with a human in the first slot and a topic of study in the second slot makes sense: as opposed to (26)-(30), we do not come across unexpected restrictions. This is congruous with the hypothesis that *study* selects both arguments. We conclude that the analysis of (1) with noun predicates is more satisfactory than the conventional analysis with *make* as the predicate, because it is more consistent with distributional evidence. According to this analysis, the support verb *make* does not contribute to argument selection.

We now consider another reasoning that may suggest *make* is the predicate in (1) and (2). A sentence requires markers of tense, mood, aspect, subject person, subject number..., the exact list depending on the language; and it turns out that the bearer of the required markers, which in English is always a verb,
is usually the main predicate. However, bearing these markers is not an inherent property of predicates; embedded predicates do not necessarily do so, and the gerund *studying* does not in *John loved studying French start-ups*.

In summary, in an SVC like (1), the selector of the arguments is a noun, while the bearer of the required markers is the support verb. The term of 'noun predicate' highlights that the predicate is analysed as lying only in the noun, which may thus act as a standalone predicate within a sentence. Some linguists prefer the alternative term 'composite predicate', which qualifies the combination of the support verb with the noun, e.g. *make (...) study*: 'composite predicate' suggests that the support verb also belongs to the predicate. The option between 'noun predicate' and 'composite predicate' signals a tenuous theoretical difference. This alternative is similar to choosing whether the predicate of the sentence *I am looking for a job* lies in the verb *look* only or in the verb/preposition combination *look for*: on the one hand, the meaning requires both *look* and *for*; on the other hand, *for* 'only' introduces the object. It is difficult to spot significant consequences to this choice.

Whatever the terminology, the discussion above showed that facts related to argument selection are central to the decision of analysing a construction as a pure SVC. As such, they are particularly relevant to defining SVCs. Such facts are used in an operational criterion (Langer, 2005: 184) that checks if the verb can be validly considered a predicate and assigned a set of arguments in the sentence; the criterion repeats the same operation for the noun. Each check consists in spotting in the sentence the candidate argumental slots of the candidate predicate, making a distributional investigation of the forms that may fill them, and observing if these forms are selected only by the candidate predicate. This is how we checked the analysis where *make* is the predicate of (1)-(2) and (23)-(25) above. The distributional investigation revealed inter-argumental selectional restrictions, which are foreign to predicate/argument structure in the usual sense. In contrast, with *study* as the candidate predicate in (1), the notion that a predicate selects its arguments sufficed to account for all the combinatorial facts.

Thus, the criterion goes as follows: For the construction to be a *stricto sensu* SVC, the analysis as a predicate must be impossible for the verb and possible for the noun. This criterion shows that in (1) the expression *make a study* can be a pure SVC.

This criterion is relatively reliable because the acceptability of combinations such as (26) can be checked through peer-shared introspection or with large corpora. The verification of this criterion requires effort, but it is decisive in many cases.

Unfortunately, it is not applicable to constructions with a single noun and no arguments, as *chaos* in *There is chaos or Chaos prevails*.

### 3.3. Support-deleting syntactic operations or 'reduction test'

The second formal criterion involves complex sentences where the candidate SVC is the predicate of an embedded clause, as the following sentence:

> (31) *I liked the sound that this phone made*

A syntactic operation (Daladier, 1978: 10) applied to (31) produces a variant (32), with almost the same meaning, but where *make* is absent, and is not replaced by another verb:

> (32) *I liked the sound of this phone*

The criterion consists in checking if such a support-deleting operation applies to some type of complex sentence. This is a necessary condition: in a pure SVC, the non-verbal predicate can also be used in the same sense without any support verb (as in *John's study, John's joke, John's flu*). Extensive investigation always showed that this is the case with *stricto sensu* support verbs and noun predicates (Gross, 1979: 865-866; Gross, 1981: 41; Giry-Schneider, 1987: 28; Fotopoulou, 1992; Meyers et al., 2004: 98; Langer, 2005: 196; Barreiro et al., 2022).

Support-deleting operations emerged as definitional of pure SVCs for several reasons. First, they are verifiable: the check relies on semantic comparison between two complete sentences like (31) and (32), or in the terminology of Gross (1975: 391-392), on 'differential semantic evaluation', a type of observation known to be particularly reproducible, i.e. observers most often agree on them.

A second motivation for using the reduction test as definitional is that the applicability of a reduction operation corroborates the intuition of semantic lightness of the verb, since it spots a context where the verb may disappear with a very slight change of meaning, if any. In other words, the reduction test can be seen as an indirect operational criterion of lightness of the verb.

This criterion provides, in many cases, an effective way of distinguishing pure support verbs from
full verbs. For example, the SVC *take a shower* passes the reduction test:

(33) *The first shower I took after surgery was harrowing*

(34) *My first shower after surgery was harrowing*

But *take a village* does not:

(35) *The last village Russia took is in the oblast*

(36) *The last village of Russia is in the oblast*

Example (36) is interpretable, but the meaning is quite different from (35), so it is not a valid reduction of (35) in the sense of the test. Therefore, *take a village* cannot be a *stricto sensu* SVC. A verb can be a support verb in a sentence, and a full verb in another. In (35), *take* is a verb predicate meaning ‘capture’; it selects the subject *Russia* and the object *village*.

The reduction test is also useful to discriminate pure SVCs from verbal idioms. For instance, we could not find any syntactic operation on *take stock* that would delete *take* while retaining the meaning of the expression:

(37) *I noticed her taking stock of the moment*

(38) *I noticed her stock of the moment*

Thus, the reduction test gives a negative result. Indeed, *take stock* is better classified as a verbal idiom than as an SVC.

The criterion has been retained as LVC.4 (V-REDUC) in the PARSEME guidelines for annotation of SVCs in corpora (Ramisch et al., 2020). The syntactic operations that produce variants without support verbs depend on the part-of-speech of the predicate (noun, adjective, prepositional phrase) and on the language. The *of*-operation exemplified by (31) and (32) holds for noun predicates in many languages, as illustrated by the following pairs in several languages. In French (Gross, 1981: 19):

(39) *Les minauderies que fait Max amusent Eva*
the affected-behaviour.PL REL makes Max amuse.PL Eva
‘The affected behaviour that Max has amuses Eva.’

(40) *Les minauderies de Max amusent Eva*
the affected-behaviour.PL of Max amuse.PL Eva
‘The affected behaviour of Max amuses Eva.’

In Greek (Fotopoulou, 1993: 23):

(41) *Η έρευνα για τα ρήματα, που έκανε ο Νίκος, είναι ενδιαφέρουσα*
the research for the verbs REL made the Níkos is interesting
‘The research on verbs Níkos made is interesting.’

(42) *Η έρευνα για τα ρήματα του Νίκου είναι ενδιαφέρουσα*
the research for the verbs the.GEN Níkos.GEN is interesting
‘Níkos’ research on verbs is interesting.’

In Portuguese (Ranchhod, 1996: 212):

(43) *Ele criticou a admiração que João tem por Lea*
he criticized the admiration REL John has for Lea
‘He criticized the admiration that John feels for Lea.’

(44) *Ele criticou a admiração de João por Lea*
he criticized the admiration of John for Lea
‘He criticized John’s admiration for Lea.’

In Korean (Han, 2000: 71):

(45) *나는 민우가 저지른 실수를 기억합니다*
*na-nun minwu-ka cecilu-n silswu-lul kiekha-pnita*
I-NOM Minu-NOM commit-DECL.PST mistake-ACC remember-DECL
‘I remember the mistake Minu made.’

(46) *나는 민우의 실수를 기억합니다*
*na-nun minwu-uy silswu-lul kiekha-pnita*
I-NOM Minu-GEN mistake-ACC remember-DECL
‘I remember Minu’s mistake.’

In Malagasy:
(47) *N-aha-sitrana an=dRabe ny fanatanjahan-tena izay n-a-tao=ny*
*PST-CAUS-healed DET=Rabe the sport REL PST-PASS-do=him*
*‘The sporting activity that was practised by him healed Rabe.’*

(48) *N-aha-sitrana an=dRabe ny fanatanjahan-tena=ny*
*PST-CAUS-healed DET=Rabe the sport=his*
*‘His sporting activity healed Rabe.’*

Other support-deleting operations are known, inclusive a similar one with *by*:

(49) *This phase involves a risk assessment that is performed by the agency*

(50) *This phase involves a risk assessment by the agency*

Here are two more in French:

(51) *Max ambitionne de faire une carrière politique*
*Max has.ambitions to make a career political*
*‘Max has ambitions to have a political career.’*

(52) *Max ambitionne une carrière politique*
*Max has.ambitions a career political*
*‘Max has ambitions for a political career.’*

(53) *Après avoir fait un saut à la banque, Guy est rentré*
*after AUX.INF do.PTCP a drop-by to the bank Guy AUX go_back.PTCP*
*‘After doing a drop-by to the bank, Guy went back.’*

(54) *Après un saut à la banque, Guy est rentré*
*after a drop-by to the bank Guy AUX go_back.PTCP*
*‘After a drop-by to the bank, Guy went back.’*

The operation exemplified by (51) and (52) was proposed by Mohri (1994: 48).

These reductions apply to numerous predicate nouns, like the reduction of (39)-(40). The latter does not apply to *faire un saut* ‘drop by’. The successful application of one support-deleting operation is sufficient for the criterion to give a positive result, so applying the test may require to know all of them.

Unfortunately, this necessary criterion does not provide a sufficient condition, since some of these syntactic operations apply to verbs like *have* and *make* even when they are *not* support verbs, but verb predicates:

(55) *I used to pilot the helicopters that the Police Department had*

In (55), the full verb *have* selects the owner (here *the Police Department*) and the belonging (*the helicopters*), but the *of*-operation applies:

(56) *I used to pilot the helicopters of the Police Department*

### 3.4. Non-co-reference of a duplicated argument or ‘co-reference test’

Finally, in particular languages and for particular categories of SVC, specific criteria have been investigated. One of them (Gross, 1976: 109; Giry-Schneider, 1987: 27-28; Gross, 1989: 38; Langer, 2005: 198), operational in English, Romance languages and Korean for predicate nouns, is applicable only when a support-deleting operation such as (31)-(32) gives positive. The support-deleting operation places one of the arguments of the noun predicate in the position of a prepositional phrase, as in (32), or of a possessive determiner, as in (57):

(57) *I liked its sound*

If we insert this prepositional phrase or possessive in the candidate SVC (2) itself, the argument in question will occur twice, first in its normal position in the SVC, and second as a prepositional phrase or as a possessive:

(58) *This phone made its sound*

The criterion is applied by checking if both instances of the argument can be definite noun phrases and refer to distinct entities, for instance a phone and a microwave. In the case of an SVC, they always refer to the same entity:

(59) *This phone made the sound that the microwave made*

(60) *This phone made the sound of the microwave*

The literature has retained the co-reference test as an additional definitional criterion because it is operational and verifiable, and its results match nicely both the intuition of pure SVC and the criterion of argument selection. This criterion is particularly useful to rule out the false positives of the reduction test, such as *have a helicopter* in (55) and (56) above:
(61) *I have a helicopter of the Police Department*

In (61), two distinct owners (*I* and *the Police Department*) coexist in the same sentence, one in its normal position and the other as a prepositional phrase, but the sentence is in use and easily interpretable. Thus, the two instances of the subject of *have* do not necessarily refer to the same entity. The co-reference test gives negative, which is consistent with the analysis of *have* as a full verb here.

To sum up, two criteria make up a relatively reliable characterization of SVC: independent selection of the arguments, and the existence of a support-deleting operation. The characterization must be completed, in the case of English, Romance languages and Korean, by that of the co-referent instances of the duplicated argument. Historically, the publication of these criteria coincides roughly with the first occurrence of the term of ‘support verb’ (Gross, 1977: 218).

## 4. Do extensions of SVC satisfy the criteria?

With these criteria, we can assess how well each type of extension matches the core notion of SVC.

### 4.1. Aspect, intensity and modality

*Get poise, lose poise, radiate poise or lack poise* are examples of aspectual, intensive and modal extensions in the sense of Labelle (1974: 9), Gross (1981: 33; 1982: 305; 1992: 712; 1998), Ranchhod (1983: 333), Langer (2005: 196), Meyers et al. (2004: 97), D'Andrea (2022: 11), Blanco & García Pérez (2023). They are defined by reference to a *stricto sensu* SVC with the same predicate noun, here *have poise*, and their defining characteristic is that the substitution of the verb has only aspectual, intensive or modal effects.<fnref n="9" /> In particular, it does not affect the selection of the arguments (Gross, 1981: 33): the new verb does not restrict the selection of the subject any more than the noun predicate does. Consequently, the criterion of independent selection of the arguments is always met. An analysis of the verb as an additional predicate on top of the noun predicate, with the noun predicate as one of its arguments (Meyers et al., 2004), is therefore unnecessary, because the subject of the extension is still an argument of the noun predicate.

If we try a support-deleting operation on the extension of SVC, it may change the meaning substantially:

(62) *I am amazed by the poise John is losing*

(63) *I am amazed by John's poise*

Since the NP without the verb, here *John's poise*, is semantically equivalent to the NP with the pure SVC, here *the poise John has*, the semantic shift caused by the verb substitution is bound to make the verbless NP different from the NP with the extension, here *the poise John is losing*. The cessative verb *lose* is definitely not ‘light’.

Finally, the criterion of the co-referent instances of the duplicated argument gives positive results in the relevant languages:

(64) *John lost his poise*

(65) *John lost Mary's poise*

The responses to the three criteria of Sections 3.2, 3.3 and 3.4 give us a clear picture of where these extensions of SVC belong. They are negative to 3.3, because of the substantial semantic contribution of the verb, but this contribution cannot be analysed as that of a usual verb predicate, because they are positive to 3.2 and 3.4, which evidences that they share the predicate/argument structure of the associated pure SVC.

Thus, a simple way to account for an aspectual, intensive or modal extension is to couple it to the corresponding *stricto sensu* SVC, considering the verb substitution as a syntactic operation. In practice, a lexical entry of a noun predicate in a lexical database can be designed by choosing a ‘basic support verb’ (in the sense of Gross & Vivès, 1986: 20) that occurs with the noun in a *stricto sensu* SVC, and by describing or encoding the features and syntactic variants of this construction. In a such-designed lexical entry, aspectual extensions are naturally included as variants (Fotopoulou et al., 2021). This solution makes sense because the semantic effect of each of these verb-substituting syntactic operations is particularly regular.

Let us consider two alternative models for analysing these verbs. If we classify them as predicative

<footnote n="9">⁹ It is a distinct matter to assess the semantic difference between a *stricto sensu* SVC and an equivalent full verb (Brinton, Akimoto, 1999: 6; Traugott, 1999: 253; Butt, 2010: 16). Aspectual, modal and intensive variants of SVC can be observed in the absence of equivalent full verb, as in *have a flu / get a flu*.</footnote>
verbs, they make up a paradoxical class, since they do not have a set of arguments of their own, which makes this solution a uselessly complex one. If we classify them as auxiliaries, they differ from auxiliaries in the usual sense, i.e. those combining with a main verb: they substitute for the support verb instead of combining with it; moreover, they combine with noun predicates much less freely than an auxiliary verb with a main verb (Danlos, 1992: 8-9). Thus, both alternative models seem less satisfactory than that of an extension of SVC.

We can draw another conclusion: even if we extend the notion of SVC, the *stricto sensu* notion of SVC remains useful. Indeed, we can define the aspectual extensions only by reference to it, and a definition of aspectual extensions is required, since they do not satisfy the definition of *stricto sensu* SVCs. Thus, there should exist a difference in terminology between pure SVCs and extensions of SVCs. As the reduction test ensures pure support verbs are semantically light, it would make sense to qualify as ‘light’ only those support verbs that occur in pure SVCs, as Meyers et al. (2004: 97) do, but not all authors follow this rule.

Historically, the interest in aspectual extensions arose from the systematic use of the criteria of Sections 3.2, 3.3 and 3.4, which revealed that some forms share the fundamental predication-related features of *stricto sensu* SVCs although their main verb is not semantically light (Labelle, 1983: 245-249).

## 4.2. Causation

Causative extensions (Gross, 1981: 37; Ranchhod, 1983: 334; Cattell, 1984; Gross, 1998: 30; Rassi et al., 2014) are also defined with reference to a *stricto sensu* SVC with the same noun predicate:

(3) *The car has poise and balance*

(4) *The new design gives the car poise and balance*

The selection of possible arguments in (4) is the same as in (3), except that the causative extension includes an additional argument with a causative role, *the new design*. The criterion of the support- deleting operation gives negative results, and so does that of the duplicate argument:

(66) *Winning gave me my rival's poise*

Accordingly, Langer (2005: 186) considers causative extensions as borderline cases of SVC. The additional causative noun phrase is consensually considered an argument in the sentence, but authors do not take a stand as to which predicate it is an argument of. It is difficult to determine which element in the sentence selects the causative noun phrase, because the distribution of this noun phrase is remarkably uniform. With many noun predicates, it is grammatically unrestricted:

(67) *(She + The engine + Matching engine to mass) gave the car poise and balance*

With others, the causative noun phrase is human:

(68) *Your tutor has the title of Doctor*

(69) *(The jury + *This fossil + *Proving the theorem) gave your tutor the title of Doctor*

These limited variations leave little room to determine whether they depend on the causative verb or on the predicate noun. The additional causative argument occurs in the sentence only in the presence of a causative extension of support verb, suggesting that this noun phrase is better analysed as an argument of the verb rather than of the noun predicate. The predicate/argument structure of *poise* in (3)-(4) could then be represented by *poise(car)*. Sure, we could theoretically consider the causative subject of (4) as an argument of *poise* and *balance* that occurs only with a causative extension. The predicate/argument structure of *poise* in (3)-(4) would then be represented by *poise(design, car)*. However, this would assign (3) a semantic structure with an unrealised causative argument, which would uselessly contrast with its syntactic structure. Semantically and syntactically, the situation is comparable with that of a verb predicate that can combine with a causative verb:

(70) *The car shines*

(71) *The coating made the car shine*

For the same reasons as above, *the coating* is usually not analysed as an argument of the verb *shine*. So, the verb *give* in (4) has an argument of its own, as opposed to what happens in pure SVCs. The causative verb can be analysed as a semantic predicate with two arguments: the causative subject and the noun predicate. The predicate/argument structure of (4) could then be represented by '*causation(design, poise(car))*''. This semantic structure conflicts somewhat with the syntactic structure of (4), since *give* has two distinct objects: on the one hand *car* and on the other hand *poise and balance*. But assigning *give* a semantic structure with three arguments would be unsatisfactory: *give(design, car, poise)* misses
the predicate/argument relation between *poise* and *car*; an alternative formula might be *give(design, car, poise(car))*, but *car* occurs twice in it, although both occurrences refer to a single entity. Thus, we prefer the analysis ‘causation(design, poise(car))’, where the causative predicate has two arguments and is realised as a verb *give* that does not behave syntactically as a usual verb predicate, since its second argument appears split in several noun phrases: in (4), *the car* and *poise and balance*.

In any case, causative extensions can be satisfactorily analysed as derivations of the corresponding *stricto sensu* SVCs.

### 4.3. Diathesis

In a diathetical extension (Gross, 1981: 23, 26, 40-41; Gross, 1989; Langer, 2005: 197; Meyers et al., 2004: 98; Ciocanea, 2011), the arguments of the noun predicate are distributed over syntactic positions differently than in another SVC with the same noun predicate:

(5) *My boyfriend made a call to a lawyer*

(6) *A lawyer received a call from my boyfriend*

(72) *The Danish Ambassador paid a visit to the President*

(73) *The President had a visit by the Danish Ambassador*

The only difference in meaning between (5) and (6), respectively (72) and (73), is that the topic is not the same. At least one of the two constructions, here (5), respectively (72), is a *stricto sensu* SVC, and the other is called a reverse SVC (Samvelian et al., 2014: 210). The selection of the arguments is the same in both constructions. A support-deleting operation exists with the prototypical SVC:

(74) *The Chamber of Commerce reports the Danish Ambassador's visit to the President*

(75) *The Chamber of Commerce reports a visit by the Danish Ambassador to the President*

However, it is usually difficult to find support-deleting constructions that clearly operate on the other construction:

(76) *?I could spot a lawyer's call from my boyfriend*

(77) *?The Chamber of Commerce reports the President's visit by the Danish Ambassador*

The criterion of the duplicated argument gives a positive result:

(78) *?The President had Cristie Kerr's visit by the Danish Ambassador*

The situation of the reverse SVC is thus similar to that of aspectual, intensive and modal extensions: it can be coupled to the corresponding *stricto sensu* SVC, considering the diathetical change as a syntactic operation.

### 4.4. Noun predicate in prepositional position

Extensions with a preposition before the predicate noun (Labelle 1974: 9; Ranchhod, 1983: 327; Langer, 2005: 186; Meyers, 2007: 28), as in *suffer from a flu*, expand the classical picture of SVC in that the noun predicate is not a direct complement of the support. Otherwise, this expression behaves as a prototypical SVC:

(79) *They lack knowledge of the disease that they suffer from*

(80) *They lack knowledge of their disease* (same meaning)

The criteria classify *suffer from a disease* in (79) as a pure SVC. Thus, the presence of the preposition is not a reason to consider *suffer from* as an extension of SVC. This is consistent with the intuition that *suffer* is semantically light here. The difference with the full verb *suffer* is perceptible in the following pair:

(81) *A number of individuals suffer from an asymptomatic infection*

(82) *He lay suffering in the rain*

The verb *suffer* implies pain in (82), not in (81).

In contrast, other extensions used with a preposition have a semantic contribution to the sentence, like the aspectual, intensive or modal extensions in Section 4.1. They do not pass the reduction test:

(83) *Boiling with anger is a stressful experience*

(84) *Anger is a stressful experience*

The intensity of the feeling is not the same in (83) and in (84). Here again, the presence of the preposition does not make the situation different from that in Section 4.1. The expression *boil with anger* can be coupled to a corresponding *stricto sensu* SVC, such as *feel anger*, considering the substitution as a syntactic operation.
### 4.5. Part of speech of support

In Korean, the inflectional properties of 있다 *issta* 'there is' lead some authors to classify it as an adjective, and it can also occur in attributive position, but (7), repeated here for convenience, otherwise behaves as an SVC where the noun predicate would be 용기 *yongki* 'courage' and the support 있다 *issta* 'there is':

(7) 민우가 용기가 있다
minwu-ka yongki-ka iss-ta
Minu-NOM courage-NOM there_be-DECL
'Minu has courage.'

The construction with a noun predicate and 있다 *issta* 'there is' satisfies the criterion of the independent selection of the arguments (Chung, 1998: 131-132):

(85) 민우가 (나에게 + 그 일에) 관심이 있다
minwu-ka (na-eykey + ku il-ey) kwansim-i iss-ta
Minu-NOM (me-DAT + this work-DAT) interest-NOM there_be-DECL
'Minu has interest for (me + this work).'

(86) 민우가 (동료들에게 + *그 일에) 예의가 있다
minwu-ka (tonglyo-tul-eykey + *ku il-ey) yeyuy-ka iss-ta
Minu-NOM (colleague-PL-DAT + *this work-DAT) politeness-NOM there_be-DECL
'Minu has politeness for (his colleagues + *the work).'

Chung (1998: 28) observes a support-deleting operation:

(87) 인아가 민우의 용기가 부럽다
ina-ka minwu-uy yongki-ka pwulep-ta
Ina-NOM Minu-GEN courage-NOM enviable-DECL
'Ina envies Minu's courage.'

The criterion of the co-referent duplicated argument gives a positive result (Chung, 1998: 29):

(88) *민우가 인아의 용기가 있다
*minwu-ka ina-uy yongki-ka iss-ta
*Minu-NOM Ina-GEN courage-NOM there_be-DECL
('Minu has Ina's courage.')

In other words, (7) differs from the classical picture of SVC only for those authors that classify the support it contains as an adjective.

The following variant of (7), where the support has been substituted, behaves as a modal extension of SVC (Chung, 1998: 3):

(89) 민우가 용기가 없다
minwu-ka yongki-ka eps-ta
Minu-NOM courage-NOM there_not_be-DECL
'Minu lacks courage.'

Here again, the inflectional properties of 없다 *epsta* 'there is not' lead some authors to classify it as an adjective.

Malagasy has constructions with a noun predicate and a main adjective as well (Ranaivoson, 1996: 141):

(90) Velom-panahiana i Soa
alive-concern the Soa
'Soa has a sudden concern.'

Such adjectival constructions are analysed as aspectual and intensive extensions of SVCs (Ranaivoson, 1996: 139; Hanitramalala, 2017: 154-162). Indeed, substituting the verb *manana* 'have' for the adjective *velona* 'alive' causes an aspectual change to the meaning:

(91) Manana fanahiana i Soa
have concern the Soa
'Soa has a concern.'

The construction of (91) qualifies as a *stricto sensu* SVC, as a support-deleting operation is observed:
(92) Ø-Fantatra fa manana fanahiana amin'ny hahatongava=nao aho
PASS-know that have concern to the coming=your I
'That I have a concern with your coming is known.'

(93) Ø-Fantatra ny fanahia=ko amin'ny hahatongava=nao
PASS-know the concern=my to the coming=your
'My having a concern with your coming is known.'

The criterion of the co-referent duplicated argument gives positive results:

(94) *Manana fanahia=ko i Soa
*have concern=my the Soa
('Soa has my concern.')

Other examples of the same type are known:

(95) (Misy + Feno) alahelo i Soa
(there_be + full) sorrow the Soa
'Soa (feels + is full of) sorrow.'

Such substitutions do not seem to affect the distribution of the arguments of the predicate noun. However, it would be interesting to confirm this observation, by building tables of properties of Malagasy predicate nouns, as has been done for several European languages and Korean.

Thus, Korean and Malagasy have constructions quite similar to SVCs, but with an adjective instead of the support verb. This difference is not a reason to consider them as extensions of SVC. Those that do not satisfy the criteria for pure SVC can be coupled to the corresponding *stricto sensu* SVC, considering the substitution as a syntactic operation.

### 4.6. Multiword support expressions

Some constructions include a multiword support expression not classified as a verb (Gross, 1988: 15; 1995; 1998: 27). The part that plays the role of the support verb contains not only a verb, but also, for example, a complement noun phrase (Sklavounou, 1994: 515) or a prepositional phrase. Abeillé & Godard (2021: 353) cite examples with a complement noun phrase in French:

(96) Max a fait (preuve + montre) de patience
Max AUX make.PTCP (proof + show) of patience
'Max showed patience.'

Ranaivoson *et al.* (2014: 190-191) cite examples with a prepositional phrase in Malagasy:

(97) Misy fitiavana an=dRabe ao am=po=nao
there_be love DET=Rabe in in=heart=your
'You are feeling love for Rabe.'

In these constructions, the noun predicate (*patience* 'patience', *fitiavana* 'love') occurs with lexical material that plays the same role as a support verb, but is not limited to a verb. The support does not include free arguments:

(98) *Max a fait (indice + démonstration) de patience
*Max AUX make.PTCP (evidence + show) of patience

In (97), the prepositional phrase in the support is susceptible to little lexical variation:

(99) Misy fitiavana an=dRabe ao an=(ati+tratra)=nao
there_be love DET=Rabe in in=(inside+lung)=your
'You are feeling love for Rabe.'

but does not include free arguments:

(100) *Misy fitiavana an=dRabe ao an=(ra+tsaina+doha)=nao
*there_be love DET=Rabe in in=(blood+mind+head)=your

Constructions (96) and (97) satisfy all the criteria for pure SVCs: argument selection, reduction test, co-reference test, as shown by the following experiments.

(101) J'apprécie la patience dont Max fait (preuve + montre)
I=appreciate the patience REL Max makes (proof + show)
'I appreciate the patience Max shows.'

(102) J'apprécie la patience de Max
I=appreciate the patience of Max
'I appreciate Max's patience.'
(103) *M-amp-a-tahotra ahy ny fitiavana an=dRabe izay misy ao am=po=nao*
PRS-CAUS-ACT-scare me the love DET=Rabe REL there_be in in=heart=your
'The love for Rabe you are feeling scares me.'

(104) *M-amp-a-tahotra ahy ny fitiava=nao an=dRabe*
PRS-CAUS-ACT-scare me the love=your DET=Rabe
'Your love for Rabe scares me.'

Other multiword supports convey a semantic contribution, mainly aspectual, intensive, modal or diathetical. For instance, *John bathed his face with tears* is an intensive variant of *John shed tears*; and *lay one's homage to the feet of* is an intensive variant of *pay homage to*. Expressive multiword supports exist in even more diverse morphosyntactic configurations. Some contain not only a verb, but also

* an adjective, as in *be mad with jealousy*, intensive extension of *feel jealousy* (Gross, 1995: 76), or in the following variant of (97) in Malagasy:

(105) *Feno fitiavana an=dRabe ao am=po=nao*
full love DET=Rabe in in=heart=your
'You are feeling plenty of love for Rabe.'

* a subject noun phrase (Gross, 1995: 80), as in:

(106) *John's eyes shone with love for Ann*

* a pronoun, as in the following construction in oral Malagasy with the intensive support misy azy (Andriamise et al., 2014: 51):

(107) *Misy azy amin'ny ditra Rabe*
there_be him in.the stubbornness Rabe
'Rabe is so stubborn.'

In these constructions, the noun predicate is *tears*, *homage*, *love*, *fitiavana* 'love', *ditra* 'stubbornness', and the expressive lexical material plays the role of an intensive variant of the corresponding basic support verb. The intensive support is often susceptible of lexical variation:

(108) *John (bathed + soaked + wet) his (face + cheeks) with tears,*
but does not include free arguments:

(109) *? John bathed his (nose + moustache + lips) with tears*

The sentences in (109) are interpretable, but are not felt as focused on the weeping.

The substitution of the intensive support for the basic support verb does not affect the selection of the arguments of the noun predicate. As is usual with extensions with a semantic contribution, support-deleting operations, when they exist, alter the meaning. The co-reference constraint observed in (106) is typical of an SVC:

(110) *\*John's eyes shone with Jim's love for Ann*

We can consider an alternative analysis of (106), where the idiom *eyes shine with* would be an extra predicate besides the noun predicate *love*. But this would not account for the constraint shown in (110).

As compared to other extensions of SVCs, all these examples show the noun predicate can occur with a support that is not a simple word. These facts lead to an analysis with a multiword extension of support verb, or even with a multiword basic support verb.

## 4.7. Noun predicate in subject position

Let us turn to constructions with the noun predicate in subject position (Gross, 1981: 43; 1988: 16-17; 1992: 712; Mel'cuk et al., 1995; Alonso Ramos, 1998: 82; Meyers, 2007: 62; Danlos, 2009; Abeillé, Godard, 2021: 347; Baptista, 2022; Fotopoulou et al., 2022). The support takes one of the following forms:

* a verb, as in *A quake struck San Francisco*, variant of *There was a quake in San Francisco*,

* an expression comprising a noun phrase, as in *The idea to sing crossed John's mind*, variant of *John had the idea to sing*,

* or an expression comprising a prepositional phrase, as in *Excitement shone in John's eyes*, variant of *John felt excitement* (Gross, 1995).

In the following example, the predicate noun *change* is the subject of the expression *take place*, which serves as support:

(111) *Many changes took place in the European Union*

All these constructions behave as the preceding extensions. They only show that the noun predicate (here *quake*, *idea*, *excitement*) is not necessarily a complement of the support.
## 4.8. Magnitude of the extension

All the extensions of SVCs reviewed above fit neatly in the framework defined for *stricto sensu* SVCs. Some of them, like *suffer from a flu*, satisfy the criteria to be classified as pure SVCs themselves. Others, like *receive a call*, are variants of a *stricto sensu* SVC, with the same noun predicate, but another support substituted through a syntactic operation. More extensions may remain to be discovered. To what proportions do they extend the set of support verbs? The number of *stricto sensu* support verbs in a language can be estimated on the basis of extensive studies that selected for each predicative noun a 'basic support verb' (Gross, Vivès, 1986: 20), and the results of such research suggest that basic support verbs can be considered a closed class. Parallel information on extensions of support verbs is sporadic, but Cicalese (1999: 458), scanning the combinations of 1480 Italian verbs with 1200 noun predicates, finds 400 stylistic, aspectual, intensive and modal extensions, which leads her to suggest that they form an open class (Cicalese, 1999: 454). The abundance of multiword support expressions seems impressive as well (cf. Section 4.6).

Such a large extension has practical implications. We can get a picture of these actual and potential consequences in languages where linguists have studied SVCs extensively.

* In NLP, methods and data are affected (cf. Section 4.9).

* The taxonomy and terminology of syntactic constructions and semantic predicates require adjustments, in particular in the case of support adjectives and support expressions vs. support verbs. Chung (1998) and Meyers et al. (2004) use the terms 'support' and 'support construction' instead of 'support verb' and 'support verb construction', since not all supports are verbs. These terms subsume support verbs (e.g. *have* in English), support adjectives (*issda* in Korean) and support expressions (*be mad with* in English). A support verb is the prototypical case of a support.

* Another terminological problem is how to name those support constructions that pass the reduction test of Section 3.3, like *have poise*, as opposed to extensions of support constructions, like *get poise*. We suggest 'pure support constructions', which would then be a sibling class to 'extensions of support constructions'. The term 'support construction', without further specification, would subsume both classes.

* In human translation and post-editing, knowledge on extensions of support constructions is likely to help. Take the example of extensions with an aspectual, modal, intensive or quantitative effect. They play the same semantic role as some adverbs, determiners and auxiliary verbs, as exemplified by the following pair:

> (112) *John is getting poise*

> (113) *John has more and more poise*

In case of a linguistic obstacle in the target language, such functional equivalence opens up possibilities of translating an extension of support by an adverb, determiner or auxiliary, or the other way round.

Linguists investigated the use of noun predicates with extensions of supports in Romance languages, English, German, Greek, Korean, and Malagasy, thus covering three language families. Much remains to be discovered in these languages, in particular a more substantial inventory of extensions of supports and their properties. The similarities observed across these three unrelated language families suggest that analogous phenomena occur elsewhere, but to our knowledge, the field is largely untouched in other language families.

## 4.9. Impact on future research

The linguistic phenomena described above have implications on NLP. They have already affected, and may affect more in the future, lexical databases and algorithms used in parsers, translation tools and annotators.

As regards rule-based parsers, several frameworks have been adapted to process extensions of SVCs: TAG (Barrier, 2006), XIP (Rassi et al., 2015), and NOOJ (Barreiro et al., 2022). The resulting parsers can annotate sentences with their syntactic structure. Such annotation can be used in direct applications of parsers, for instance translation tools (Danlos, 1992). They can also be useful to applications constructed through deep learning. Such applications are usually 'fine-tuned', i.e. trained, on a corpus of natural language text. By using a corpus of text annotated with syntactic structures, i.e. a treebank, the designers of such applications may obtain better results than with a corpus of raw text. The more
informative the annotation, the better the performance of the applications. Accurate parsing of predicate-argument structure would be central to downstream tasks such as extraction of semantic roles or and word sense disambiguation. However, current dependency treebanks do not annotate predicates, and consequently, neither do dependency parsers. Identifying predicates and arguments and labeling arguments in parse trees that lack this information is challenging (Indurkhya et al., 2021). Annotating treebanks with predicates, including noun predicates, would be a more principled approach (Cinková, Kolářová, 2005). In such a context, annotating extensions of supports would introduce relevant aspectual, modal, intensive, and quantitative labels, and therefore indirectly improve current parsers. Thus, taking into account knowledge on support constructions might contribute to facilitate the construction of satisfactory applications, including large language models and translation systems.

Rule-based parsers use lexical databases as repositories of information on lexical entries. For example, the parsers described by Rassi et al. (2015) and Barreiro et al. (2022) use the lexicon-grammar of Portuguese predicate nouns, which includes lexical information about extensions of support constructions and their properties. NomBank (Meyers, 2007) is an English treebank with lexical information on predicate nouns and SVCs, including extensions of supports, without making a distinction between these and pure supports (Meyers, 2007: 65). Nombank is a possible source for extracting an incomplete lexical database of English predicate nouns.

Databases of predicate nouns for NLP remain incomplete as regards their coverage of predicate nouns, support constructions, and extensions of supports.

There is plenty of room for future research within other linguistic frameworks as well. Construction Grammar and Generative Grammar, for example, have exploited little of the accumulated knowledge and available data on extensions of supports.

This is also true for linguistic typology, in large part because extensions of supports are unexplored in many languages and in whole families of languages. Experience gained in other languages suggests some directions of research to remedy this shortage of facts:

* inventorying predicate nouns;

* inventorying pure supports, investigating their combinations with predicate nouns, and inventorying support-deleting operations;

* recording extensions of supports in use with these nouns and studying their syntactic properties and semantic effects, including which pure supports they substitute.

Such tasks are not easy work. They are labour-intensive, because they imply scanning the lexicon or large corpora. They require judgments by native speakers, not only to observe which constructions are in use, but also to compare constructions semantically. Take for example the following French constructions:

(114) *Guy a froid*
Guy has cold
‘Guy is cold.’

(115) *Guy prend froid*
Guy catches cold
‘Guy is catching a cold.’

At first sight, both look like SVCs. Indeed, *avoir* ‘have’ is a common pure support verb; *prendre* ‘take’ is a common inchoative variant of *avoir*; and *froid* ‘cold’ is a noun, which can also be used without these verbs to denote the sensation of cold:

(116) *Ce froid est désagréable*
That cold is unpleasant
‘That sensation of cold is unpleasant.’

However, the semantic difference between (114) and (115) is not the aspectual difference between *have poise* and *get poise* expected as the regular effect of the usual syntactic operation introducing an extension of support: (114) denotes a static sensation, whereas (115) reports the onset of a disease. Consequently, the substitution of *prendre* for *avoir* here is not an instance of this operation. In addition, (115) does not accept any support-deleting operation:
(117) *Le froid que Guy a pris est léger
*The cold that Guy AUX catch.PTCP is mild

(118) *Le froid de Guy est léger
*The cold of Guy is mild

We can hypothesize that (114) accepts a support-deleting operation:

(119) Avoir froid est désagréable
Have.INF cold is unpleasant
‘Being cold is unpleasant.’

(120) Le froid est désagréable
The cold is unpleasant
‘The sensation of cold is unpleasant.’

The meaning of (119) and (120) is very close, but this does not mean that the relation between them is a regular syntactic operation. Confirming this status would require checking if it applies successfully to enough nouns, and if it keeps consistent properties across the compatible lexical entries. This involves exploring the lexicon of nouns, and repeatedly performing semantic comparisons between sentences. But this is the price to pay for gathering observations in such a way that they build up a large amount of consistent data.

## Conclusion

The notion of SVC provides a powerful framework of description for non-verbal predicates, and this framework is relevant to several extensions of the notion of SVC known in literature. The extensions investigated in this article allow for a better organization of syntactic and lexical description. In these extensions, the support has additional functions (aspectual, intensive, modal, causative) and/or the elements of the predicate/argument structure are distributed over the elements of the syntactic construction in alternative ways. The *stricto sensu* notion of SVC remains useful as separate from the extended notion, since the former is needed to define the latter. In addition, the status of closed class of basic support verbs is in contrast with the abundance of extensions of support verbs.

In consequence, the definitions of the notion of SVC require a brush-up, so that the notion does not rely on details of the prototypical verb/noun examples such as *have poise*. In particular, the proposed adjustments to the notion of SVC require terminological updates: the terms ‘support verb’ and ‘support verb construction’ could be replaced by ‘support’ and ‘support construction,’ both already used by Chung (1998) and Meyers et al. (2004). We also recommend the terms ‘extension of support’ and ‘extension of support construction’ to avoid confusion with, respectively, ‘pure support’ and ‘pure support construction’.

## Acknowledgments

This article has greatly profited from the comments of the referees.

## Abbreviations

<table><tr><td>ACC</td><td>accusative</td></tr><tr><td>ACT</td><td>active</td></tr><tr><td>AUX</td><td>auxiliary</td></tr><tr><td>CAUS</td><td>causative</td></tr><tr><td>DAT</td><td>dative</td></tr><tr><td>DECL</td><td>declarative</td></tr><tr><td>DET</td><td>determiner</td></tr><tr><td>GEN</td><td>genitive</td></tr><tr><td>INF</td><td>infinitive</td></tr><tr><td>NOM</td><td>nominative</td></tr><tr><td>PASS</td><td>passive</td></tr><tr><td>PL</td><td>plural</td></tr><tr><td>PRS</td><td>present</td></tr><tr><td>PST</td><td>past</td></tr><tr><td>PTCP</td><td>participle</td></tr><tr><td>REL</td><td>relative</td></tr></table>
**Competing interests**

The authors have no competing interests to declare.

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