Syntactic variation of support verb constructions

Authors: Laporte, Éric; Ranchhod, Elisabete; Yannacopoulou, Anastasia

Source: Lingvisticae Investigationes, Volume 31, Number 2, 2008 , pp. 173-185(13)

Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing Company

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Abstract:

We report experiments about the syntactic variations of support verb constructions, a special type of multiword expressions (MWEs) containing predicative nouns. In these expressions, the noun can occur with or without the verb, with no clear-cut semantic difference. We extracted from a large French corpus a set of examples of the two situations and derived statistical results from these data. The extraction involved large-coverage language resources and finite-state techniques. The results show that, most frequently, predicative nouns occur without a support verb. This fact has consequences on methods of extracting or recognising MWEs.

Document Type: Research article

DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1075/li.31.2.04lap

Publication date: 2008-12-01