Semantic Co-composition in Light Verb Constructions

Light Verb Constructions (LVCs) such as Italian prendere una decisione ‘to make a decision’ and fare una passeggiata ‘to go for a walk’ have been widely studied from different theoretical perspectives, while still remaining a highly debated topic in linguistics. Traditional approaches maintain that in LVCs, the verb is devoid of meaning and has no predicative role; the predication resides in the noun. These approaches no longer represent state-of-the-art research on LVCs. More recent approaches (see, inter alia, Butt 2010) claim that LVCs represent a type of complex predicate in which each element contributes to the joint predication. In this study, we propose an additional approach, called co-compositional, which rules out the traditional model of semantically empty Light Verbs in LVCs, and is compatible with the complex predicate account, in which it can be easily integrated. The proposal is based on two theoretical tools; first, a revised version of the dichotomic distinction between predicative and referring expressions proposed inter alia in the work of Searle (1969) and Bossong (1992); second, an enriched theory of semantic composition (called co-composition, see Pustejovsky 1995, 2012) according to which, in verb-argument combinations, verb and noun influence each other’s meanings in subtle ways. The goal of the contribution is to corroborate our claim with empirical data and propose a representation of the collaborative way in which noun and verb contribute to determine the overall meaning of an LVC. For the discussion, we will focus on Italian LVCs with Light Verbs prendere ‘take’ and fare ‘to make, to do’.