Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Light verb


 * The following discussion is an archived debate of the proposed deletion of the article below. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review).  No further edits should be made to this page.

The result was kept. I'm closing this early because the nominator himself has voted "keep with rewrite" below, which I take to be a withdrawal of the AFD. Angr (talk) 19:27, 20 July 2012 (UTC)

Light verb

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 * Note: This debate has been included in the list of Language-related deletion discussions.  Cliff  Smith 17:44, 16 July 2012 (UTC)
 * Note: This debate has been included in the list of Language-related deletion discussions.  Cliff  Smith 17:44, 16 July 2012 (UTC)

I have nominated this article for deletion. It appears to be original research and cites only a single reference for the entire page. This concept doesn't even exist in any of the mainstream fields related to this sort of topic including linguistics or grammar.Drew.ward (talk) 12:37, 16 July 2012 (UTC)


 * Delete - I don't think it makes a lot of sense to say that a verb has "little semantic content" - evidently, it wouldn't be in the sentence if it didn't contribute to its meaning. Contribution to meaning isn't something that can be quantified ("the weak verb adds 5% of the meaning"). Of course, if this is a category which has been suggested by some professional linguists, it may be notable, but would need more information about who is proposing it. The article as it is presents it as an established concept. The article discusses valid questions of semantic composition, but this would probably fit better in other articles. Count Truthstein (talk) 13:59, 16 July 2012 (UTC)
 * I disagree with your first sentence; there are plenty of examples of words that only serve syntactic structure, without meaning of their own. —Tamfang (talk) 18:54, 16 July 2012 (UTC)


 * Keep - Is notable based on evidence provided below. Count Truthstein (talk) 14:30, 16 July 2012 (UTC)
 * Keep. Here are but a few of many scholarly publications on the topic:
 * Grimshaw, Jane, and Mester, Armin (1988). "Light Verbs and Θ-Marking". Linguistic Inquiry 19(2):205–232.
 * Miyamoto, T. (2000). The Light Verb Construction in Japanese: the role of the verbal noun. John Benjamins Publishing Company.
 * Butt, M. and Geuder, W. (2001). "On the (semi)lexical status of light verbs". In Corver, N. and van Riemsdijk, H., editors, Semi-lexical Categories: On the content of function words and the function of content words, pp. 323–370. Mouton de Gruyter, Berlin.
 * Stevenson, S., Fazly, A., and North, R. (2004). "Statistical measures of the semi-productivity of light verb constructions". In Proceedings of the ACL 2004 Workshop on Multiword Expressions: Integrating Processing, pp. 1–8, Barcelona, Spain. ACL
 * Yee Fan Tan, Min-Yen Kan, and Hang Cui (2006). "Extending corpus-based identification of light verb constructions using a supervised learning framework". In Proceedings of the EACL Workshop on Multi-Word Expressions in a Multilingual Contexts, pp. 49–56, Trento, Italy, April. ACL.
 * Samardžić, Tanja and Merlo, Paola (2010). "Cross-lingual variation of light verb constructions: Using paral&shy;lel corpora and automatic alignment for linguistic re&shy;search". In Proceedings of the 2010 Workshop on NLP and Linguistics: Finding the Common Ground, pp. 52–60, Uppsala, Sweden, July. ACL.
 * This should suffice to establish that the topic is notable, but Google scholar search will give you many more. --Lambiam 14:23, 16 July 2012 (UTC)


 * Keep. As per evidence above. I do agree that the page could contain more references, and an explanation of what a light verb construction is. However, it doesn't make the topic non-notable. (Disclaimer: I am one of the authors cited above.) --unkx80 (talk) 15:43, 16 July 2012 (UTC)
 * Keep - already sourced, and easily sourceable further. Bearian (talk) 20:14, 17 July 2012 (UTC)
 * Keep per sources added and other improvements by Lambiam, Tjo3ya, Unkx80 and others over the past couple of days, with my thanks to those editors. Cnilep (talk) 03:07, 18 July 2012 (UTC)
 * Keep The sources listed above by user Lambian clearly demonstrate notability. Not an expert by any means but I wondered if something could be added to the article to suggest that it is possibly not a universally accepted linguistic category. The article on Predicates does this well, although I stress that my remarks are from the point of view of a user rather than a potential editor.  Cottonshirt  τ   09:51, 20 July 2012 (UTC)
 * keep with rewrite As the consensus seems to be "keep" and I will concur that the article has encyclopaedic value. However, I qualify this "keep" with the requirement that the article be rewritten to make it clear that this is only a single theory of many and that it's neither generally accepted nor a concrete part of the grammar of any given language.  Also, I feel that the article (and mentions of it in other articles) should be reworded to light verb constructions as the theory proposed in the sources cited purports not that there is such thing as a "light verb" which is how this article reads and how most readers would interpret it, but rather that regular verbs may sometimes be used in such a way that they do not carry the ability to convey the full verbal content of the verbal construction in which they appear without functioning in tandem with an additional element.  I would also recommend that rather than being treated as a sub-classification of verbs as it currently is (grouping them with things like auxiliaries in a functional manner) that instead the theory of these constructions be treated similarly to phrasal verbs and idiomatic constructions -- multi-word functional grammatical units which only taken as a whole convey a given set of semantic, syntactic, and pragmatic qualities.Drew.ward (talk) 14:17, 20 July 2012 (UTC)
 * The above discussion is preserved as an archive of the debate. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this page.