Corpus-based Investigations on German Support Verb Constructions

Abstract

Support verb constructions (SVC) like 'take a risk' or 'set into motion' are composed of a verb component ('take', 'set') and a noun component ('risk', 'motion'). The noun component is typically a nominalization of a verb or an adjective. The verb component is semantically reduced, when compared to its main verb meaning. The base verb or adjective mainly determines the semantics and the argument structure of the whole construction. This specific type of complex predicate formation has always been a challenge for natural language processing and machine translation. Contemporary German grammars describe SVCs as complex predicates with characteristic morphosyntactic and semantic features. In this paper we report on several corpus-based case studies, in which some of these features were evaluated on the basis of the DWDS corpus (Geyken, 2007). Our main objective is to demonstrate the importance of investigating the properties of SVCs on a broad empirical basis and the need to consider the textual context of these constructions.We briefly discuss the properties that distinguish SVCs from typical idioms on the one hand, and from typical “free” syntagmatic constructions on the other. We explore factors of morphosyntactic flexibility of SVCs and suggest that morphosyntactic constraints in predicative nouns are not sufficiently explained by the assumed lack of referentiality of these nouns. Then, we evaluate whether SVCs are interchangeable with their semantically corresponding base verbs, e.g. 'Hilfe leisten' (‘to provide help’) and 'helfen' (‘to help’). Our study shows that in many cases the substitution leads to a shift of meaning, requires considerable syntactic restructuring, or is not possible at all. We try to systematize some of the factors that influence the interchangeability of support verb and base verb constructions. The aim of this case study is to state the properties of the two construction types and their stylistic and functional benefits more precisely. This is a step towards a discourse-oriented perspective on SVCs, which will complement studies on their syntactic and semantic properties.

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