A Study On English Light Verb Constructions From The Perspectives Of Semantics And Syntax

There are some phenomenon in English which people often use as common, such as "have a look", "take a walk" and "make a list". These phrases always share the same meanings with corresponding verbs "look", "walk" and "list". As the particular characteristics of this structure, they attract many linguists attention on this field. For convenience, this paper shortened as "V1+a+V2". After explaining the forming process and semantic properties of each part, it makes people get further understanding of Light verb Constructions (LVCs) and gives some suggestion of English teaching on collaborations of the LVCs.This paper is based on previous study and observation on the relevant data, and it aims to analyzes the general rules of LVCs from the perspectives of morphology, semantics and syntax, and also explains the reasons and existential significance. By using the linguistic theories, the thesis compares the differences of V1 in LVCs and heavy verb phrases in syntactical operations. The conclusions are as follows:first, from the morphological point of view, the thesis analyzes the linear morphological characteristics and the constituents composed in English LVCs. The author found that during the nominalization process the more obvious the morphological changes the more nominalized the verbs are, that is why V2 has tendency to take verb as its lexical category. Secondly, from the semantic point of view, it explains semantic levels of the light verbs and the semantic characteristics that collocated with, and further understanding of the whole structural meanings. It is proved that causativeness of light verbs has an influence on the light degree of LVCs, the more causativeness the light verbs, the higher the light degree of it, which also enhances the frequency of the constructions. Thirdly, from the syntactic point of view, the lexical category of V2 is not noun but nominalized verb, which weakens the function of verbs and possesses the properties of nouns. The generative process of LVCs is raising the whole structure to T, which aims to assign theta roles to the nominative case of the agent.