Light verbs pose an a challenge in linguistics because of its syntactic and semantic versatility and its unique distribution different from regular verbs with higher semantic content and selectional resrictions. Due to its light grammatical content, earlier natural language processing studies typically put light verbs in a stop word list and ignore them. Recently, however, classification and id...

A subset of German function verbs can be used either in a full, concrete, 'heavy' ("take a computer") or in a more metaphorical, abstract or 'light' meaning ("take a shower", no actual 'taking' involved). The present magnetoencephalographic (MEG) study explored whether this subset of 'light' verbs is represented in distinct cortical processes. A random sequence of German 'heavy', 'light', and p...

This paper addresses the problem of learning the class of raising verbs (e.g seem). These verbs are potentially problematic for learners in that unlike typical main verbs these verbs do not stand in a semantic relation with any Noun Phrase (NP) arguments. Moreover, a second class of verbs, known as control verbs, shares certain distributional properties with raising verbs, but the two verb clas...

Verbs like begin and enjoy have been assumed to select for events and would coerce an entity-denoting complement to an event in semantic representation; such type-shifting operation engenders additional processing cost. However, recent studies show that this effect is observable only for aspectual verbs (e.g. begin), but not psychological verbs (e.g. enjoy), suggesting the set of “coercion verb...

Russian language acquisition requires deep and intensive studying of the concept of verbs of motion. There is a strong opinion that verbs of motion are one of the hardest concepts in the Russian language. However, it is an important issue, as motion verbs are among the most used in any language and nowadays there are hundreds of expressions with these verbs which can be heard quite frequently i...