Introduction to the jungle

This is a revised and updated version of Butt (2003), which noted that the study of light verbs and complex predicates is fraught with dangers and misunderstandings that go beyond the merely terminological. This chapter thus attempts to provide some clarity by addressing how light verbs and complex predicates can be identified cross-linguistically, what the relationship between the two is and whether light verbs must always be associated with uniform syntactic and semantic properties. Based primarily on both diachronic and synchronic evidence from the South Asian language Urdu, but also by taking cross-linguistic patterns into account, this chapter attempts to pull together the relevant available knowledge in order to arrive at a more definitive understanding of light verbs.

Jespersen (1965, Volume VI: 117) is generally credited with first coining the term light verb, which he applied to English V+NP constructions as in (I).

The intuition behind the term ‘light’ is that although these constructions respect the standard verb complement schema in English, the verbs take, give, etc., cannot be said to be predicating fully. That is, one does not actually physically ‘take’ a ‘plunge’ but rather one ‘plunges’. The verbs therefore seem to be more of a verbal licenser for nouns.