Light Verb Constructions as Means of Expressing Semelfactive/Multiplicative Meanings in J.K. Rowling’s Discourse (on the basis of novels ‘Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone’ and ‘Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets’)
Keywords:
semantics, light verb construction, deverbal noun, semelfactivity, multiplicativity.
Abstract
The article discusses the problem of light verb constructions in contemporary English on the basis of novels ‘Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone’ and ‘Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets’ by J.K. Rowling. We (the authors) state that most of light verb constructions denote either semelfactive or multiplicative meanings within the framework of Smith’s (1997) theory of aspect in which five situation types, namely states, activities, achievements, accomplishments, and semelfactives are distinguished. The aspectual meaning of a light verb construction is concentrated in its nominal component which can be proved by the existence of for, with-phrases like for a better look, where the verbal component is omitted. The singular of the deverbal noun indicates a semelfactive meaning, whereas the plural form expresses a multiplicative one. The verbal component in such constructions may be represented by ‘light’ verbs such as take, have, make, do, give or ‘heavy’ verbs like cast, draw, shoot etc. The qualitative characteristics of light verb constructions can be intensified by prepositive and postpositive modifiers such as quick, short, sharp etc. On the basis of novels ‘Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone’ and ‘Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets’ by J.K. Rowling 97 and 115 light verb constructions have been singled out and analyzed respectively. The results of the research contribute to the study of verbal plurality in English.
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References
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Tron’, A. (2008). Means of Expressing the Category of Frequency Rate in Modern English. (Ph.D. Thesis). I. Franko Lviv National University.
Tu, Y. & Roth, D. (2011). Learning English light verb constructions: contextual or statistical. Proceedings of the Workshop on Multiword Expressions: from Parsing and Generation to the Real World, 31–39.
Wierzbicka, A. (1982). Why Can You have a drink when You Can’t *have an eat? Language, 58, No 4, 753–799. DOI: 10.2307/413956
Wittenberg, E. (2014). With light verb constructions from syntax to concepts. (Ph.D. Thesis). Central European University. DOI: 10.13140/2.1.2349.4401
Algeo, J. (1997). ‘Having a Look at the Expanded Predicate’, The Verb in Contemporary English. Theory and Description, Bas Aarts & Conrad F. Meyer (eds), 203–217. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Allerton, D. (2002). Stretched verb constructions in English. London & New York: Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203167649
Baptista, J., Rassi, A., & Sandos-Turani, C. (2014). The fuzzy boundaries of operator verb and support verb constructions with dar ‘give’ and ter ‘have’ in Brazilian Portuguese. Workshop on Lexical and Grammatical Resourses for Language Processing. Dublin, Ireland. DOI: 10.3115/v1/W14-5812
Beavers, J., Ponvert, E. & Wechsler, S. (2009). Possession of a controlled substantive: “have” and other verbs of possession. Proceedings of SALT, Vol. 18, 108–125. DOI: 10.3765/salt.v0i0.2502
Biber, D., Johansson, St. & Leech, G. (eds.) (1999). Longman Grammar of Spoken and Written English. Harlow: Essex: Pearson Education Ltd. (LGSWE).
Bjerre, T. 1999. Event structure and support verb constructions. Proceedings of the 4th Student Session of ESSLLI’99. Utrecht, The Netherlands.
Brinton, L. J. (1998). Aspectuality and countability: A cross-categorial analogy. English Language and Linguistics, 2(01), 37–63. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/S136067430000068X
Brugman, C. (2001). Light verbs and polysemy. Language Sciences, 23, 551–578. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/S0388-0001(00)00036-X
Butt, M. (2010). The light verb jungle. In Harvard Working Paper in Linguistics, vol. 9. Cambridge University Press, 1–49. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511712234.004
Cattell, R. (1984). Composite predicates in English, Vol. 17. Sydney: Academic Press.
Chae, H.-R. (1997). Verbal nouns and light verbs in Korean. Language Research, 33, 4, 581-600. Corpus ID: 59576967
Claridge, C. (2000). Multi-word verbs in Early Modern English: A corpus-based study. Amsterdam-Atlanta: Editions Rodopi.
Crowther, J. et al., (eds.) (2000). Oxford Collocations Dictionary for Students of English. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Curme, G. (1935). Parts of speech and accidence. New York: DC Health and Company.
Fazly, A., & Stevenson, S. (2007). Distinguishing subtypes of multiword expressions using linguistically-motivated statistical measures. In Proceedings of the Workshop on a Broader Perspective on Multiword Expressions. Prague. Association for Computational Linguistics, 9–16. DOI: https://doi.org/10.3115/1613704.1613706
Grimshaw, J. & Mester, A. (1988). Light verbs and theta-marking. Linguistic Inquiry, 19, 205–232. URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/4178587
Halliday, M. (1994). An introduction to functional grammar. 2nd ed. London: Arnold.
Hornby A.S. & Wehmeier S. (eds.). (2000). Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionary of Current English. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Huddleston, R., & Pullum, G. (eds.). (2002). Cambridge Grammar of the English Language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781316423530
Karimi, S. (1997). Persian complex verbs: Idiomatic or compositional? Lexicology, 3(1), 273–318.
Kearns, K. (2002). Light Verbs in English. (Master’s thesis). MIT, Cambridge, MA.
Keller, I. (2015). Discrete and indiscrete ways of expressing an action and its attributive characteristics in English, 27–32, № 10. Tomsk.
Kiparsky, P. (1997). Remarks on denominal verbs. In Complex predicates, Alex Alsina, Joan Bresnan, and Peter Sells (eds). CSLI, Standford University, 473–500.
Langer, S. & Schnorbusch, D. (2005). A formal specification of support verb constructions. semantics in the lexicon [Semantik im Lexikon]. 179–202. Tübingen: GunterNarr.
Lin, T.H. (2001). Light verb syntax and the theory of phrase structure. (Unpublished PhD thesis). University of California, Irvine. https://www.proquest.com/openview/182b165e052b28e56a89ff17695dc1cb/1?pq-origsite=gscholar&cbl=18750&diss=y
Liu, L.C.-S. (1997). Light verbs and accusative–ing gerund in Taiwanese. UCI Working Paper in Linguistics 3, 99–123
Matsumoto, Y. (1996). A syntactic account of light verb phenomena in Japanese. Journal of East Asian Linguistics, 5, 107–149. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00215071
Miyagawa, S. (1989). Light verbs and the ergative hypothesis. Linguistic Inquiry, 20, 659–668.
Miyamoto, T. (2000). The light verb construction in Japanese: the role of the verbal noun. John Benjamins Publishing Company. https://doi.org/10.1075/la.29
Mohammad, J. & Karimi, S. (1992). Light verbs are taking over: Complex verbs in Persian. Proceedings of WECOL, 5, 195–212.
Nesselhauf, N. (2004). Learner corpora and their potential for language teaching. How to use corpora in language teaching. 125–152. Amstersam: John Benjamins. https://doi.org/10.1075/scl.12.11nes
Ogonovska, O. (1991). Verbal substitution in English. Lviv: Svit. ISBN 5-11-000890-6
Palmer, M., Gildea, D., & Kingsbury, P. (2005). The proposition bank: An annotated corpus of semantic roles. Computational Linguistics, 31(1), 71–206. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1162/0891201053630264
Quirk, R. et al (eds.) (1985). A Comprehensive Grammar of the English Language. Harlow: Longman.
Rowling, J. K. (1999). Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets. New York: Arthur A. Levine Books.
Rowling, J. K. (2008). Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone. New York: Scholastic.
Stein, G. (1991). The Phrasal Verb Type ‘To Have a Look’ in Modern English. International Review of Applied Linguistics in Language Teaching, 29, 1–29. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1515/iral.1991.29.1.1
Stevenson, S., Fazly, A. & North, R. (2004). Second ACL Workshop on Multiword Expressions: Integrating Processing. Barcelona, Spain: Association for Computational Linguistics, 1–8. URL: https://aclanthology.org/W04-04
Summers, D. (ed). (2003). Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English. (LDCE). Harlow: Longman.
Tan, Y.F. & Cui, H. (2006). Extending corpus-based identification of light verb constructions using a supervised learning framework. In Proceedings of the EACL Workshop on 260 Multiword Expressions in a Multilingual Contexts. Italy: Trento, 49–56.
Traugott, E. (1999). A historical overview of complex predicate types. In Collocational and idiomatic aspects of composite predicates in the history of English. L.J. Brinton & M. Akimoto (eds.). Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 239–260. DOI: 10.1075/slcs.47.74clo
Tron’, A. (2008). Means of Expressing the Category of Frequency Rate in Modern English. (Ph.D. Thesis). I. Franko Lviv National University.
Tu, Y. & Roth, D. (2011). Learning English light verb constructions: contextual or statistical. Proceedings of the Workshop on Multiword Expressions: from Parsing and Generation to the Real World, 31–39.
Wierzbicka, A. (1982). Why Can You have a drink when You Can’t *have an eat? Language, 58, No 4, 753–799. DOI: 10.2307/413956
Wittenberg, E. (2014). With light verb constructions from syntax to concepts. (Ph.D. Thesis). Central European University. DOI: 10.13140/2.1.2349.4401
Published
2022-03-10
How to Cite
Tron, A., Derevianko, O., Zhumbei, M., & Shpilchak, L. (2022). Light Verb Constructions as Means of Expressing Semelfactive/Multiplicative Meanings in J.K. Rowling’s Discourse (on the basis of novels ‘Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone’ and ‘Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets’). Amazonia Investiga, 11(50), 43-54. https://doi.org/10.34069/AI/2022.50.02.5
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