Light verb constructions in the history 
of English

A Diachronic Analysis of Light Verb Constructions in Old Swedish

“…The steady increase in frequency of LVCs and the increase in the number of unique NPs in LVCs in earlier English, for instance, has fueled the debate over what might have brought about their expansion in Middle English (Traugott 1999). Possible explanations range from language contact (Ronan 2012, 2014) to a general drift toward analyticity (Hiltunen 1999) or the rise in the use of indefinite articles (Brinton 2008, Elenbaas 2013). The majority of recent historical syntactic research focuses on the possibility that CPs with light verbs have been grammaticalized to express aspectual subtleties: In phrases such as take a bath versus to bathe , for instance, the LVC as a whole is claimed to express boundedness (Brinton & Traugott 2005).…”

“…One strand of research assumes a narrow definition by only including those examples with zero-derivations, such as drink in to have a drink (Nickel 1968, Wierzbicka 1982), or only those with NPs that have a morphologically-related simplex verb, such as decide > decision in to make a decision (Hoffman 1972, Live 1973, Dixon 1992, Algeo 1995). However, others, such as Claridge (2000) and Ronan (2012, 2014), use a broader definition for the NP complement in LVCs to include any abstract or action nouns. According to Quirk et al 1985, some nouns, such as effort in to make an effort , do not have a simplex-verb equivalent (* to effort) but are often considered part of LVCs because of their abstractness and frequent occurrence in collocations with typical light verbs.…”

“…According to Quirk et al 1985, some nouns, such as effort in to make an effort , do not have a simplex-verb equivalent (* to effort) but are often considered part of LVCs because of their abstractness and frequent occurrence in collocations with typical light verbs. As pointed out by Ronan (2014), diachronic studies often face an additional complication when dealing with the requirement that the light verb + NP combination must have a simplex verb equivalent to be considered an LVC. In some cases, the simplex verb no longer exists in the language, as in take (a) wife (compare Old English wīfian ), while in others, the simplex verb arose much later, after the first attestations of the relevant light verb + NP pairing, for example, to battle (Ronan 2014:20).…”

“…With a broader definition of light verbs in mind, Allerton discusses high frequency verbs that include the usual five light verbs, medium-frequency light verbs, such as feel, find, grant , and receive , among others, and those with a low frequency, including add, lodge , or launch. 8 This kind of top-down search procedure is followed by Claridge (2000) and Ronan (2012, 2014) in their historical linguistic studies.…”

Determining light verb constructions in contemporary British and Irish English

“…: 209). Still, while early English varieties fare somewhat better (Denison 1991, Brinton and Akimoto 1999, Claridge 2000, Matsumoto 2008, Ronan 2012, 2014 there remain only few comprehensive corpus-based quantitative studies on light verb constructions in contemporary varieties of English. Allerton (2002), in his book-length study, investigates light verb patterns with a complete set of light verbs in the 100 million word British National Corpus, but, as previously mentioned, the 5 investigation is restricted to predicate nouns starting with the letter a and does not consider any of the predicate nouns starting with any other letter than a.…”