Abstract:

In this paper we explore the collocations and semantics of light verbs in German and propose a new kind of monolingual German dictionary entry for such verbs, paying equal attention to phraseology and meaning. As a rule of thumb, we follow the semantic criterion that the meaning of a light verb is more than usually bound up with its collocations (which, typically, are few in number and high in frequency). We consider problems of terminology and criteria. A corpus-based analysis of three verbs (leisten, erteilen, and hegen) is presented.

Document Type: Research article

DOI: 10.1093/ijl/ecl027