Light Verb Constructions and Their Families - A Corpus Study on G erman ‘stehen unter’- LVC s (2021)

Abstract: The paper reports on a corpus study of German light verb constructions (LVCs). LVCs come in families which exemplify systematic interpretation patterns. The paper’s aim is to account for the properties determining these patterns on the basis of a corpus study on German LVCs of the type ‘stehen unter’ NP’ (‘stand under NP’).

## introduction: lvcs and their families light verb constructions (lvc) are a specific type of predicatively used multiword expressions. 1 a lvc consists of a semantically light verb and a phrasal element, e.g., a pp as in the german examples in (1). the german lvcs in (1) consist of the light verb stehen 'stand' and a prepositional phrase (pp) headed by unter 'under'. stehen is, according to @xcite , one of the most frequently occurring light verbs in german. the english notion 'light verb' goes back to @xcite who assumed that light verb are semantically empty. this position has been questioned by a number of authors (e.g. @xcite @xcite @xcite @xcite who insist that the light verb makes at least a subtle contribution to the lvc's overall meaning. this position also prevails in the german research tradition. von @xcite who introduced the corresponding german notion 'funktionsverb' (lit. function verb)-recognized that light verbs contribute in terms of aktionsart features as well as causativity. thus, the light verb is not semantically empty but only semantically reduced compared to its corresponding heavy uses. in its heavy use (2-a) stehen expresses that its subject referent is spatially located in an upright posture; the spatial location is specified by the ppcomplement (see @xcite for a detailed discussion of german posture verbs). as a light verb, stehen does not express that its subject referent is being spatially located (2-b). rather, the verb only contributes to the complex predicate's event structure. lvcs headed by stehen always express state predications (e.g. von @xcite @xcite . the pp-internal noun provides the lvc's main predicational content. the lvc in (2-b) expresses that the subject referent is in a state of shock; substituting the noun by e.g. stress 'stress' results in a different predication. the lvc unter stress stehen 'be stressed' (lit. under stress stand) expresses that the subject referent is in a state of stress. like simplex predicates, lvcs can be classified with respect to semantic features like aktionsart and causativity. these features have been systematically related to the light verb's lexical meaning (e.g. von @xcite . but is has rarely been noticed that systematicity is also found on a semantically deeper level. the lvcs in (1) exem-plify a different interpretation pattern from those in (2). following @xcite , i use the label 'family' to designate lvcs which conform to the same interpretation pattern. the notion of a lvc-family is defined as follows (following fleischhauer 2019, 32, fleischhauer and turus in press): the lvcs in (1) belong to a family i call 'event passive-family' since they are paraphrased by an event passive construction (so-called werden 'become'-passive). unter beobachtung stehen in (1-a) is paraphrased as 'beobachtet werden' ('be observed' lit. observed become). the two lvcs unter schock stehen 'be shocked' (2-b) and unter stress stehen 'be stressed' superficially look like the lvcs in (1) but resist an event passive paraphrase. instead, they are paraphrased by a state passive construction (sein 'be' + passive participle). foot_1 unter schock stehen (2-b), for example, is paraphrased as 'geschockt sein' ('be shocked'; lit. shocked be). the current paper presents a first systematic case study of lvc-families. the central questions are: which lvcs are members of these families? and, what are the characteristic properties of the members of the individual families? these questions have been explored on the basis of a corpus study. ## corpus study for the corpus study on german stehen unter-lvcs, i used the tagged-c2 archive of the german reference corpus (dereko). the archive basically contains newspaper articles and consists of 1.022.895.699 words organized in 4.491.138 texts. the corpus search has been carried out using the search engine cosmas ii. i will start a brief discussion of the search criterion used for the corpus study and then proceed by discussing the individual annotation steps. the annotation has been independently done by two annotators, in case of disagreement a third annotator has been consulted. ## the semantic type of the pp-internal nouns in a final step, all nouns occurring pp-internally were classified with respect to the type of object they are denoting. it was first checked whether the pp-internal nouns denote an eventuality. the notion 'eventuality' is used as a cover term for states and events @xcite ). eventuality-denoting nouns accept temporal (e.g. gestern 'yesterday') and aspectual modifiers (e.g. andauernd 'continuous') @xcite . only five nouns (7-a) -all belonging to the state passive-family -reject temporal/aspectual modification. an example of a lvc containing the artefact noun drogen 'drugs' is shown in (7-b). the example expresses that the subject referent is in a state induced by drugs (i.e. is influenced by drugs). with respect to the eventuality-denoting nouns, the two lvc-families show clear differences. the ppinternal nouns occurring in the event-passive family denote events, those occurring in the state-passive family are state-denoting. there exist a number of criteria which allow distinguishing event-denoting nouns from state-denoting ones (cf. @xcite . only event-denoting nouns can be realized as the subject of predicates like geschehen/passieren 'happen', beenden 'stop/finish' and unterbrochen sein 'be interrupted'. for details concerning the criteria, the reader is referred to the mentioned literature. in section 1, i introduced the lvc unter beobachtung stehen 'be under observation' as a representative member of the event passive-family. the example in (8) demonstrates that the noun beobachtung 'observation' can be realized as the subject of geschehen 'happen'. the noun is also licensed as the subject argument of the other mentioned predicates (not illustrated for reasons of space) and qualifies as being event-denoting. not only drogen can be realized within an unter-pp without light stehen; the same is true of the other nouns occurring in the two families. this is a relevant observation as it demonstrated that the passive-like interpretation is only dependent on this specific use of the preposition unter foot_2 but neither on the light verb nor on the light verb construction as such. the basic function of the light verb is embedding the passive-like meaning expressed by the pp within a state predication. ## conclusion & outlook the paper started from the observation that lvcs instantiated by the same morphosyntactic typein our case 'stehen + unter' -are heterogeneous with respect to their interpretation. lvcs of this type exemplify (at least) two different systematic interpretation patterns (which have been termed 'families'). both families share a passive-like interpretation which has been related to the specific use of the preposition unter. the differences between the two families have been related to the semantic type of the pp-internal nouns. the existence of lvc-families has (to the best of my knowledge) so far only been recognized for persian lvcs (e.g. @xcite @xcite but it has been gone unnoticed for other languages (especially for german). it will be definitely worth investigating whether we come across similar or even the same lvc-families in other languages. a natural candidate to look at might be dutch which -in difference to other languages as for example turkish or persian -shows a light use of a verb meaning 'stand'. another question to be investigated in the future is whether we can identify further characteristics with respect to which the mentioned lvc-families differ from each other. a promising feature to look at is causativization since it seems to be the case that the two families show different preferences in the choice of their causative light verb. lvcs of the event passive-family prefer stehen 'put' (lit. cause to stand), those of the state passive-family prefer setzen 'put' (lit. cause to sit). the results of a limited corpus study on the distribution of the two causative lvcs stellen and setzen are summarized in due to reasons of space, i cannot go into further details (especially with respect to the motivation of the different preferences) but take this as a promising starting point for a continuation study on the different families of stehen unter-lvcs. concerning further automation, we are planing to train learning algorithms on the basis of the annotated data set for the automatic identification of stehen-lvcs.