Where do aspectual variants of light verb constructions belong?

TL;DR

This paper investigates the classification of aspectual variants of light verb constructions, proposing features to better distinguish between idioms, light verb constructions, and compositional phrases.

Contribution

It introduces a set of features to improve the categorization of ambiguous light verb expressions, clarifying their linguistic boundaries.

Findings

Proposed features effectively differentiate between idioms, light verb constructions, and compositional phrases.

The study offers a systematic approach to classify ambiguous aspectual expressions.

Results enhance understanding of light verb construction boundaries.

Abstract

Expressions with an aspectual variant of a light verb, e.g. 'take on debt' vs. 'have debt', are frequent in texts but often difficult to classify between verbal idioms, light verb constructions or compositional phrases. We investigate the properties of such expressions with a disputed membership and propose a selection of features that determine more satisfactory boundaries between the three categories in this zone, assigning the expressions to one of them.