Conference: The Fifteenth biennial Language Resources and Evaluation Conference (LREC 2026), Palma de Mallorca (Spain), 11-16 May 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
Access the code and Light Verb Construction-Full Verb Construction dataset available on GitHub
Psycholinguistic research indicates that choosing one syntactic construction over another to describe an event can influence its perceived duration: Light Verb Constructions (LVCs) such as punctive events in count syntax (to give a kiss) and durative events in mass syntax (to do research) are perceived as taking less time than their Full Verb Constructions (FVCs; to kiss and to research). Similar computational results were achieved using BERT embeddings to semantically project events onto a one-dimensional Duration scale. We reproduce and further develop this experiment with explicit word embeddings from our own co-occurrence count-based vector space. By semantically projecting 158 LVC-FVC pairs onto our Duration scale, we find that LVCs are modelled as significantly shorter than FVCs. However, we do not find an overall statistically significant difference in duration between sentences containing the target LVCs and FVCs. We demonstrate that semantic properties observed in human experiments and in BERT embeddings can also be modelled using explicit word embeddings, which have the advantage of being fully transparent. However, using transcripts from spoken conversations can be challenging when studying a specific construction: optimising the extraction of sentences containing the target expressions and composition of their meanings are to be addressed in future work.
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 or not.
Anything you want to discuss? Get in touch with me through LinkedIn or via lin.de.huybrecht@vub.be