Conference: The 36th Meeting of Computational Linguistics in The Netherlands (CLIN36, 2026), Brussels (Belgium), 9 September 2026

Authors: Lin de Huybrecht, Geraint A. Wiggins

E-mail: lin.de.huybrecht@vub.be

Affiliation: Computational Creativity Lab, part of the Artificial Intelligence Research Group
at Vrije Universiteit Brussel (VUB)

Funding: Flanders Artificial Intelligence Research (FAIR) Program

Keywords: light verb constructions, language modelling, event construal, distributional semantics

The code and Light Verb Construction-Full Verb Construction dataset will be made available on GitHub

According to psycholinguistic research, the perceived duration of an event is influenced by the syntactic construction used to describe it. Wittenberg & Levy (2017) found that punctive events in count syntax (e.g., give a kiss) and durative events in mass syntax (give advice), both in Light Verb Construction (LVC), are perceived as taking less time than when described by their corresponding Full Verb Construction (FVC; kiss and advising, resp.). Liu & Chersoni (2023) found similar results using computational methods. They semantically projected contextualised BERT embeddings onto a Duration scale (Devlin et al., 2019; Grand et al., 2022). Huybrecht & Wiggins (2026) further developed their work by instead using explicit word embeddings from a fully transparent co-occurrence count-based vector space.

We expand this research by studying event duration of Dutch LVC-FVC pairs using embeddings from BERTje (de Vries et al., 2019). Dutch LVCs are distinguished from English LVCs by the use of diminutives for certain expressions (i.e., -je suffix), which can already emphasise the duration of the event being described. Some expressions have a non-diminutive alterative (een bad(je) nemen – take a (small) bath), while others do not (een praatje/*praat maken – to have a little chat). We semantically project 153 LVC-FVC pairs onto our duration scale. Using a right-tailed paired T-test (α=0.05, p<2.2x10^-16, t(152)=9.74, CI [0.51,+inf)), we find events in LVC are modelled as significantly shorter in duration than events in FVC. This preliminary work on Dutch data provides a starting point for gaining more insight into modelling event construal in Dutch.

de Vries, W., van Cranenburgh, A., Bisazza, A., Caselli, T., van Noord, G., & Nissim, M. (2019). BERTje: A Dutch BERT Model (arXiv:1912.09582).

Devlin, J., Chang, M.-W., Lee, K., & Toutanova, K. (2019). BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding. Proc. of the 2019 Conf. of the NAACL-HLT, Vol. 1, 4171–4186. https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/N19-1423

Grand, G., Blank, I. A., Pereira, F., & Fedorenko, E. (2022). Semantic projection recovers rich human knowledge of multiple object features from word embeddings. Nat. Hum. Behav., 6(7), 975–987. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-022-01316-8

Huybrecht, L., & Wiggins, G. A. (2026). How Long Does a Quick Kiss Take? Studying Event Duration of Light Verb Constructions Using Explicit Word Embeddings. Proc. of the 15th LREC. 9618–9634. https://doi.org/10.63317/5gsno5o8o3ve

Liu, C., & Chersoni, E. (2023). On Quick Kisses and How to Make Them Count: A Study on Event Construal in Light Verb Constructions with BERT. Proc. of the 6th BlackboxNLP Workshop (pp. 367–378). ACL. https://aclanthology.org/2023.blackboxnlp-1.28

Wittenberg, E., & Levy, R. (2017). If you want a quick kiss, make it count: How choice of syntactic construction affects event construal. J. Mem. Lang., 94, 254–271. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jml.2016.12.001

Light verb constructions are complex predicates that have a semantically bleached verb.

Here are some publications about light verb constructions:

• Wittenberg, E. (2016). With light verb constructions from syntax to concepts (Vol. 7). Universitätsverlag Potsdam. Download

• Wittenberg, E., & Levy, R. (2017). If you want a quick kiss, make it count: How choice of syntactic construction affects event construal. Journal of memory and language, 94, 254-271. Download

• Gilquin, G. (2019). Light verb constructions in spoken L2 English: An exploratory cross-sectional study. International Journal of Learner Corpus Research, 5(2), 181-206. Download

Full verbs carry semantic information in a sense that light verbs do not. Light verbs need (an) additional word(s), usually a noun, to convey meaning. Light verbs are somewhat similar to auxiliary verbs, but do not satisfy the tests for whether or not a verb is an auxiliary verb.

• een afspraak maken (afspreken)
• een douche nemen (douchen)
• een speech geven (speechen)
• een pauze nemen (pauzeren)
• een dutje doen (dutten)
• een presentatie geven (presenteren)
• een knuffel geven (knuffelen)