A Diachronic Analysis of Light Verb Constructions in Old Swedish

Abstract

This study provides an empirical analysis of light verb constructions in Old Swedish. These constructions contain a semantically light verb, such as giva ‘give’ or göra ‘make’, that may be paired with an abstract nominal object, as in giva radh ‘give advice’ or giva hiälp ‘give help’. Using a corpus of nine Old Swedish texts written in the 13th, 14th, and 15th centuries, I track the frequency of light verb constructions and analyze the range of transitive light verb + object pairings. I consider the effects of time, genre, and the type of modification to the nominal object in the quantitative analysis. The results contribute to ongoing discussions in crosslinguistic, diachronic research on the reasons for the increase in frequency of light verb constructions as well as the possibility that this construction exhibits characteristics of grammaticalization or lexicalization.