Syntactic variation of support verb constructions

TL;DR

This paper investigates the syntactic variations of support verb constructions in French, revealing that predicative nouns often occur without the support verb, impacting methods for extracting and recognizing multiword expressions.

Contribution

It presents large-scale statistical analysis of support verb constructions using finite-state techniques on a French corpus, highlighting their syntactic variability.

Findings

Predicative nouns frequently occur without support verbs

Support verb presence varies across contexts

Implications for MWE extraction methods

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.