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Part of
Corpus Interrogation and Grammatical Patterns
Edited by Kristin Davidse, Caroline Gentens, Lobke Ghesquière and Lieven Vandelanotte
[Studies in Corpus Linguistics 63] 2014
► pp. 15–34

Light verb constructions in the history 
of English

| Université de Lausanne

This study investigates light verb constructions in sample corpora from Old- Middle- and Early Modern English. The use of one coherent definition of light verb constructions throughout these periods allows direct comparison of the overall structures and of the light verbs used. The comparison shows that frequencies are highest in the Middle English texts and decrease in the Early Modern data. While the Old English counts are significantly lower than Middle English ones, their frequencies are far from negligible. It is argued that where previous assessments consider Old English light verb constructions to be rare or non-existent, this is partly due to having used the perspective of the most frequent Modern English light verbs rather than working from the perspective of which light verbs were frequent at the period in question.

Published online: 14 November 2014
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/scl.63.05ron
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Cited by 3 other publications

Ronan, Patricia
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Ronan, Patricia & Gerold Schneider
2015. Determining light verb constructions in contemporary British and Irish English. International Journal of Corpus Linguistics 20:3 ► pp. 326 ff. DOI logo
Sundquist, John D.
2020. Productivity, richness, and diversity of light verb constructions in the history of American English. Journal of Historical Linguistics 10:3 ► pp. 349 ff. DOI logo

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