Valentina Piunno - Böcker

The notion of light verb constructions has been traditionally related to the ‘insignificance’ of the verb, which is described as a grammatical item only codifying TAM system and ϕ-features, whereas the whole predicative content is thought to be conveyed by the noun. This book deals with the light verb constructions as instances of complex verbs, intended as multi-predicational but monoclausal structures. This allows to deepen the actual verb lightness, the effective noun predicativity, as well as their effect on the cohesion of the construction. The papers in this volume reflect on the concrete contribution of noun and verb to the event and argument structure, and on the relevance of semantically different noun classes for the verb selection. From different theoretical approaches, data of a great variety of languages are investigated, such as Indo-European languages – both modern (Germanic, Slavic, Romance and Iranian languages) and ancient (Latin and Ancient Greek) – but also Mandarin Chinese, and different polysynthetic languages (e.g. Ket, Nivkh, Murrinh-Patha, Kiowa, Bininj Gun-wok, Ainu). The range of topics, languages and perspectives presented in this book make it of great interest to both theoretical and applied linguists.

The book takes its cue from the topics of PhrasaLex, a workshop dedicated to phraseological approaches to learner’s lexicography which took place for the second time in July 2021 and is connected to the lexicographic project PhraseBase. Considering the great interest that studies on patterns of meaning have gained in lexicology and lexicography, we not only delve into the more phraseological approach, but broaden our horizon to include further approaches, both established and new, that have as their common thread the identification and analysis of patterns of meaning in their interaction with grammatical patterns. In this way, we present the commonalities of a complex, innovative and partly interdisciplinary strand of research that currently involves disciplines such as theoretical and applied linguistics, corpus linguistics and computational linguistics. The book provides insights into different theoretical approaches examining the interface between lexis, semantics and grammar, by dealing with methodological advances and issues regarding corpus linguistics explorations and the lexicographic process. A special focus is on the phraseological nature of language as well as on its implication for the design of (learner’s) dictionaries.