Where Do Aspectual Variants of Light Verb Constructions Belong? (2021)

Abstract: Expressions with an aspectual variant of a light verb, e.g. ‘take on debt’ vs. ‘have debt’, are frequent in texts but often difficult to classify between verbal idioms, light verb constructions or compositional phrases. We investigate the properties of such expressions with a disputed membership and propose a selection of features that determine more satisfactory boundaries between the three categories in this zone, assigning the expressions to one of them.

## introduction an aspectual variant of a light verb or support verb (lv) 1 is a verb that contributes an aspectual meaning when substituted for a lv, as take on debt vs. have debt. expressions with such verbs are frequent in texts but often difficult to classify between verbal idioms (vi), light verb constructions (lvc) or fully compositional phrases (cp), even following carefully the parseme guidelines for corpus annotation @xcite . in this paper, we focus on french expressions comprising (i) a verb that can be an aspectual variant of a lv in some contexts, and (ii) a single dependent of this verb, either direct: prendre garde (lit. 'take vigilance') 'be careful', prendre une décision (lit. 'take a decision') 'make a decision', prendre conscience (lit. 'take awareness') 'get aware', or prepositional: prendre en compte 'take into account', entrer en discussion 'enter into talks'. we investigate the properties of such expressions with a disputed membership and propose a selection of features that determine more satisfactory boundaries between the three categories in this zone, 1 we will not make a difference between these two terms, because the way authors use them is not consistently correlated with differences between notions or approaches. ## related work aspectual variants of light verb constructions, e.g. (fr) prendre une couleur (lit. 'take a colour') 'take on some colour' vs. avoir une couleur 'have some colour', are investigated by linguists from the beginning of the 1980s and often called 'extensions' of lvc @xcite @xcite . the distinction between vi and lvc dates back to the same period @xcite . for an expression to be considered an extension of lvc instead of vi, @xcite sets explicit requirements that relate to (i) the syntactic operation producing the expression from the lvc, and (ii) the lvc proper itself. her method is applied recently in @xcite and @xcite . for these authors, after @xcite , the notion of lvc encompasses any construction where the main predicate is borne by a lexical unit distinct from the main verb, namely the noun couleur 'colour' in our example. thus, a 2argument predicate appears as a verb in (1), a noun in (2) and an adjective (adj) in (3): in the framework of computational linguists' interest for mwe, @xcite classify lvc among syntactically flexible lexicalized mwe. the idea that lvc are not fully compositional is explained by the strong distributional constraints between the lv and the predicate. for example, have some colour and carry out a study are lvc, whereas *carry out a colour does not make sense, and have some study is a cp, i.e. a combination only restricted by constraints specific to its components, each of which retains a meaning it has in other contexts, here have as 'own' or 'hold'. for @xcite , lvc are fully compositional collocations, and the distributional constraints between the lv and the predicate are specific features of the predicate, in the same way as the selection of the preposition on is a feature of the verb depend in our future depends on libraries. in this paper, we stick to the current mainstream terminology where lvc are mwe, and we use 'cp' as an equivalent to 'non-mwe'. the boundaries between vi, lvc and cp are considered a problem, but this problem is rarely addressed. @xcite uses supervised learning, but does not investigate the linguistic criteria used to annotate the corpus. the parseme guidelines for annotation of verbal mwe in corpora @xcite , partially reproduced in fig. 1 , take into account many languages and the views of a broad group of researchers, and are a milestone on the path to delimitations based on criteria. however, aspectual variants of lvc are not handled in a completely consistent way, which motivates the present research. ## survey of relevant features we briefly survey the main five features that have been invoked for the vi/lvc/cp distinction and are relevant to expressions with aspectual verbs. ## scope of the paper french verbs such as entamer 'start', entrer 'enter', prendre 'take', tomber 'fall', conserver 'preserve', garder 'keep', perdre 'lose', sortir 'get out', retrouver 'regain', multiplier 'multiply'... have been described as aspectual variants of lv. expressions with such verbs pose more or less difficult challenges to the vi/lvc/cp distinction. in this section, we put aside two types that do not pose classification problems, then we identify two sets of expressions that do. for consistency with related work, we use the tests in the parseme guidelines whenever possible. first, some phrases like prendre en compte 'take into account' are reasonably easily analysed as vi, as showing distributional constraints (cf. 3.3) and no relation with any lvc. the meaning of prendre ses responsabilités (lit. 'take one's responsibilities') 'face up to one's responsibilities' changes unexpectedly if we replace the noun with related words: e.g. prendre ses engagements (lit. 'take one's commitments') means 'make one's commitments', not 'face up to one's commitments', and *prendre ses obligations (lit. 'take one's duties') does not make sense. this observation characterizes prendre ses responsabilités as a vi. the meaning of prendre garde (lit. 'take vigilance') 'be careful' also changes unexpectedly in case of lexical substitutions, and differs from that of the two lvc avoir la garde 'have custody' and avoir det garde 'have det posture', a term of martial arts; thus, prendre garde is annotated as vi in the parseme corpus. we also exclude from this paper the phrases that qualify as lvc.full by satisfying all the parseme tests until lvc.4, e.g. prendre un bain (lit. 'take a bath') 'have a bath'. this includes positivity to test lvc.3, which entails that the verb of these phrases does not add any aspectual meaning to the noun. phrases such as prendre un bain 'have a bath' are consensually classified as lvc. we now move on to phrases where the verb adds an aspectual meaning. ## aspectual variants of pp idioms in phrases such as entrer en vigueur (lit. 'enter into vigour') 'come into force', the idiomatic meaning requires the preposition, i.e. it is not observed in [?]la vigueur de ce règlement (lit. 'the vigour of this regulation'). but the idiomatic meaning does not require the verb, since it is observed in l'accord de pêche en vigueur 'the fisheries agreement in force'; when the verb is present, it adds an aspectual meaning to the pp idiom, here a notion of change of state. ## conclusion aspectual variants of lvc are frequent in texts but have not been assigned a consensual place among the categories mwe, lvc or vi yet. the present work addresses this challenge by: a category of aspectual variants of lvc, like prendre conscience 'become aware', can be delimited on the following criterion: a construction is considered as such in case of a close relation with a lvc proper, here avoir conscience 'be aware', where the predicate/ argument structure is preserved. due to the close similarity between the two types of constructions, aspectual variants of lvc could be considered as a special case of lvc, just like causal lvc are in the parseme guidelines. many pp idioms like en vigueur 'in force' can be analysed as predicational forms and are usable with a copula, which behaves as a lv. such expressions, just like the lvc we just mentioned, often have aspectual variants like entrer en vigueur 'come into force'. we gave our examples in french, but a similar behaviour of aspectual variants of lvc has been reported in portuguese @xcite @xcite @xcite , italian @xcite , greek @xcite @xcite , and spanish @xcite . our conclusions, both on aspectual variants of lvc and on pp idioms, are extensible to these languages, and maybe to english @xcite ; garcia-vega, machonis, 2014), romanian @xcite , and korean @xcite .