Determining light verb constructions in contemporary British and Irish English
Patricia Ronan | Université de Lausanne
Gerold Schneider | Universität Konstanz
This study implements an automated parser-based approach to the investigation of light verb constructions. The database consisting of ICE-GB and ICE-IRE is used to obtain qualitative and quantitative results on the use of light verb structures. The study explains and evaluates the steps employed to optimize parser output in detecting open lists of light verb constructions. It discusses the qualitative usage differences of these structures in the data between the two varieties and finds that ICE-GB favours fewer high frequency light verbs while ICE-IRE contains more diverse lower frequency light verbs and more passives. Overall, counts of light verb constructions are considerably higher than previously assumed. The projected counts suggest that attestations of light verb constructions will increase considerably if the search is not restricted to certain high-frequency light verbs as is typically done in studies employing manual or semi-automatic approaches to data collection.
Keywords: light verb constructions, automatic parsing, collocation measures, British English, Irish English
Published online: 28 August 2015
https://doi.org/10.1075/ijcl.20.3.03ron
https://doi.org/10.1075/ijcl.20.3.03ron
References
Algeo, J
Aston, G., & Burnard, L
Brinton, L., & Akimoto, M
Denison, D
Evert, S
Gries, S. Th
Hoffmann, S., Hundt, M., & Mukherjee, J
Kallen, J.L., & Kirk, J.M
Leech, G., Hundt, M., Mair, Chr., & Smith, N
Lehmann, H.M., & Schneider, G
Matsumoto, M
Meyers, A., Macleod, C., Yangarber, R., Grishman, R., Barrett, L., & Reeves, R
Mukherjee, J., & Gries, S. Th
Mukherjee, J., & Hoffmann, S
Nagy T., I., Vincze, V., & Farkas, R
Nelson, G., Wallis, S., & Aarts, B
O’Donnell, M.B., & Ellis, N
(2010) Towards an inventory of English verb-argument constructions. In M. Sahlgren, O. Knutsson (Eds.),
Proceedings of the ACL 2010. Proceedings of the NAACL HLT Workshop on Extracting and Using Constructions in Computational Linguistics Session, Los Angeles, California, 2-4 June 2010
(pp. 9–16). Los Angeles, CA: ACL.
Ronan, P
Schneider, G
Schneider, G., & Zipp, L
(2013) Discovering new verb-preposition combinations in New Englishes. In J. Mukherjee & M. Huber (Eds.), Studies in Variation, Contacts and Change in English. Helsinki, Finland: Varieng. Retrieved from http://www.helsinki.fi/varieng/series/volumes/13/schneider_zipp/ (last accessed May 2015).
Tu, Y., & Roth, D
Cited by
Cited by 8 other publications
No author info given
MEHL, SETH
Mehl, Seth
Ronan, Patricia
Schneider, Gerold & Gintare Grigonyte
Sundquist, John D.
Sundquist, John D.
Yilmaz, Selahattin & Ute Römer
This list is based on CrossRef data as of 15 april 2022. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers. Any errors therein should be reported to them.