The synchronic and diachronic status of English light verbs

This article elucidates the synchronic and diachronic status of English light verbs. In doing so, it contributes to the debate on the status of light verbs cross-linguistically. Synchronically, light verbs appear to straddle the boundary between lexical and functional categories. This has led to the view that light verbs are a diachronic stage on a grammaticalisation cline from full verb to auxiliary. Another view holds that light verbs are historically a dead-end. In this article I will present synchronic and diachronic data that show that the history of English light verbs does not display signs of grammaticalisation. I will argue that English light verbs are synchronic variants of full verbs.