Light Verbs and the Lexical Category Bias of Their Complements

Light verb constructions are periphrastic paraphrases of verbs. For ex-ample, English expressions put the blame on, give someone a kick, take a walk are instances of such paraphrases for the verbs blame, kick, and walk. The verbs that head these phrases are called “light ” verbs because they are considered as semantically empty or impoverished. Their complements are headed by deverbal nouns, which are considered as a mixed category, showing some nominal and some verbal properties. Light verb constructions present a problem for natural language processing because their meaning is consid-erably idiosyncratic and non-compositional and they cannot be translated to other languages literally. On the other hand, they are not conventionalized enough to be treated as idioms or collocations. They require a special ap-proach, distinguishing them from regular verb phrases, but at the same time, taking into account their underlying regularities. The aim of this study is to quantify the lexical category bias of the nominal complements of light verb