The emergence of light verb constructions

Abstract

Abstract This paper takes a data-driven perspective on the grammaticalization of German light verb constructions (LVCs) with kommen ‘come’. LVCs are complex predicates consisting of a semantically light verb and an eventive noun realized within a phrasal complement, e.g. German zur Vollendung kommen, lit. ‘come into completion’. We assume that (at least) two different processes interact in the emergence of LVCs: the desemanticization of the verb on the one hand and the realization of eventive nouns in the complement-PP of the verb on the other. In order to check whether these processes take place in parallel or if one precedes the other, we conduct a corpus study based on samples from the Reference Corpus of Middle High German (REM) and the Bonn Early New High German Corpus (FnhdC), focusing on the animacy and concreteness of the subject NPs and the PP-internal nouns. Our results indicate that we can first observe an increase in the use of abstract nouns in subject position and that only later – from Middle High German to Early New High German – eventive nouns in PP-internal position become more frequent.