We propose a statistical measure for the degree of acceptability of light verb constructions, such as take a walk, based on their linguistic properties. Our measure shows good correlations with human ratings on unseen test data. Moreover, we find that our measure correlates more strongly when the potential complements of the construction (such as walk, stroll, or run) are separated into semantically similar classes. Our analysis demonstrates the systematic nature of the semi-productivity of these constructions.
A statistical method is applied to measure the acceptability of possible light verb constructions in REF , which correlates reasonably well with human judgments.
Statistical Measures Of The Semi-Productivity Of Light Verb Constructions
Workshop On Multiword Expressions: Integrating Processing
Mathematics