The emergence of light verb constructions

This paper takes a data-driven perspective on the grammaticalization of German light verb constructions (LVCs) with kommen ‘come’. LVCs are complex predicates consisting of a semantically light verb and an eventive noun realized within a phrasal complement, e.g. German zur Vollendung kommen, lit. ‘come into completion’. We assume that (at least) two different processes interact in the emergence of LVCs: the desemanticization of the verb on the one hand and the realization of eventive nouns in the complement-PP of the verb on the other. In order to check whether these processes take place in parallel or if one precedes the other, we conduct a corpus study based on samples from the Reference Corpus of Middle High German (REM) and the Bonn Early New High German Corpus (FnhdC), focusing on the animacy and concreteness of the subject NPs and the PP-internal nouns. Our results indicate that we can first observe an increase in the use of abstract nouns in subject position and that only later – from Middle High German to Early New High German – eventive nouns in PP-internal position become more frequent.

CONTRASTIVE-AND-LINGUISTIC ANALYSIS IN THE CONTEXT OF GERMAN AS A FOREIGN AND TECHNICAL LANGUAGE (Part 2)

Постановка задачи. В предлагаемой статье рассматривается немецкий язык как иностранный и профессиональный язык с контрастивно-лингвистической точки зрения. При этом основное внимание выбранного билингвального сравнения языков уделяется немецкому и корейскому языкам. Специализированные языковые структуры в этих двух языках подвергаются анализу на основе формирования и использования устойчивых глагольно-именных словосочетаний. Также рассматривается вопрос о семантической производительности устойчивых глагольно-именных словосочетаний. Что касается посредничества профессионального языка, то здесь выявляются различия между общеупотребительным и профессиональным языками, а также наблюдается усиление устного профессионального общения. Statement of the problem. The following article focuses on the area of German as a foreign and technical language and is examined by choosing a contrastive perspective. The focus of the selected bilingual approach is on the German and Korean languages. The technical structures of the two languages are analyzed on the basis of the formation and use of light verb constructions. The issue of the semantic performance of light verb constructions is also investigated. With regard to the teaching of languages for special purposes (technical languages) the main differences between general and technical languages are worked out connected with a plea for a consideration of spoken technical communication.

A corpus-based description of cleft constructions in Persian

This paper presents a corpus-based description of cleft constructions in Persian showing that they display more diversity and complexity than currently described in the literature. Previous studies have only focused on constructions that echo one of the three main classes of clefts (IT-clefts, pseudoclefts and reversed pseudoclefts), and generally use Persian data in parallel to their English counterparts in order to contribute to the ongoing theoretical debates on the analysis of clefts. In order to achieve a more accurate picture of Persian clefts, we annotated and studied cleft and cleft-like sentences in a sample of about 550 relative clauses extracted from a journalistic corpus. Our study revealed new categories of cleft constructions that have not been reported previously; in particular, the lexically headed pseudoclefts whose usage is straightforwardly linked to the abundance of noun-verb light verb constructions in Persian. Moreover, we take issue with some claims made in prior work on the nature of the demonstrative in Persian IT-clefts based on empirical arguments.

CONTRASTIVE-AND-LINGUISTIC ANALYSIS IN THE CONTEXT OF GERMAN AS A FOREIGN AND TECHNICAL LANGUAGE Part 1)

Постановка задачи. В предлагаемой статье рассматривается немецкий язык как иностранный и профессиональный язык с контрастивно-лингвистической точки зрения. При этом основное внимание выбранного билингвального сравнения языков уделяется немецкому и корейскому языкам. Специализированные языковые структуры в этих двух языках подвергаются анализу на основе формирования и использования устойчивых глагольно-именных словосочетаний. Также рассматривается вопрос о семантической производительности устойчивых глагольно-именных словосочетаний. Что касается посредничества профессионального языка, то здесь выявляются различия между общеупотребительным и профессиональным языками, а также наблюдается усиление устного профессионального общения. Statement of the problem. The following article focuses on the area of German as a foreign and technical language and is examined by choosing a contrastive perspective. The focus of the selected bilingual approach is on the German and Korean languages. The technical structures of the two languages are analyzed on the basis of the formation and use of light verb constructions. The issue of the semantic performance of light verb constructions is also investigated. With regard to the teaching of languages for special purposes (technical languages) the main differences between general and technical languages are worked out connected with a plea for a consideration of spoken technical communication.

Nativised structural patterns of make light verb construction in Malaysian English

This study investigated nativised structural patterns of light verb constructions (LVCs) in Malaysian English using a corpus-based, descriptive approach to analyse grammatical innovations. To facilitate the analysis, a 100-million-word general corpus comprising threads from Lowyat.Net, a popular Internet forum in Malaysia, was created, and the British National Corpus (BNC) was used as the reference corpus. Using the Sketch Engine corpus tool, the three most frequently occurring make LVCs in the Malaysian English corpus were identified. The data was analysed to reveal the differences between the structures of make LVC in Malaysian English and its prototypical structure. The findings show that besides the non-isomorphic deverbal noun form, make LVCs in Malaysian English prefer taking the basic constituents of an LVC. Nativised LVCs are essentially those with zero articles and isomorphic deverbal nouns taking definite articles, determiners, and descriptive adjectives in their modifier slots. The zero article LVC is the most common nativised structure pattern due to the influence of substrate languages in Malaysian English.

An Investigation into Lexical Aspect of Persian Light Verbs: zadan, dǎdan and xordan Based on Huddleston and Pullum (2002)

The verb and its complement have their specific contributions to the meaning of predicate. Sometimes, the verb takes a more modest share than the complement in expressing the predicate; such verbs are referred to as light verbs. However, the degree of the lightness of the verbs is neither systematic nor predictable in verb constructions. We aim to investigate the lexical aspects of the Persian light verbs “zadan” (to hit), “dǎdan” (to give), and “xordan” (to eat) based on Huddleston and Pullum’s Model (2002). There are many verbs that lend themselves to light verb constructions. The data are collected from the Updating Persian Corpus consisting of 48M words. To this end, we extracted all light verbs in the sentences stored on the Updating Persian Corpus using the AntConc software based on Mansouri’s approach (2013). The sampling was done using random sampling method that has scientific validity and is generalizable. In random sampling, every entity of the population enjoys equal chance of inclusion in the sample. Then we analyzed the sentences containing light verbs in terms of the state and activity lexical aspects. The results were plotted in tables and figures with annotations of the verb features. For similar patterns, only one pattern was selected for further analysis. The light verb patterns were listed and analyzed in an inventory one by one. The study adopted a descriptive-analytical method and a corpus-based survey design. Descriptive research has both applied and basic aspects so that it leads to the discovery of facts and bodies of knowledge in an inductive way. An important characteristic of descriptive studies is that the researcher may not manipulate or control the status and role of variables. The researcher merely tends to study and describe what already exists. In this study, we used library research and content analysis methods.