The present research aims at giving a quantitative and qualitative analysis of semantic and syntactic properties of prototypically different light verb constructions with the synonymous deverbal nouns chat, talk, and conversation in British English. The constructions under investigation are studied in terms of combinability with different light verbs, complementation patterns, and adjectival modification. Data for the analysis are collected from the British National Corpus (BNC). The study reveals that prototypically different types of light verb constructions behave in a similar way in terms of the researched aspects. However, significant differences can be found when the deverbal nouns under investigation combine with different light verbs.
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