Abstract
Light verb constructions (LVCs) are verb-noun constructions in which the noun carries the semanticmeaning and the verb is semantically reduced, when compared with its main meaning, for example,atlikti analizę (‘to perform an analysis’). LVCs in Lithuanian have not been addressed much so far. Theanalysis of Lithuanian LVCs was carried out as a part of the PARSEME project on verbal identification ofmultiword expressions (MWE). This paper aims at presenting some initial findings on the identificationof LVCs in Lithuanian, based on the 1st edition of the PARSEME shared-task results (2017). We describethe identification process according to the semantic and syntactic features of LVCs (PARSEME guidelines1.0 2017) and discuss the grammatical features of the identified Lithuanian LVCs.
LVCs seem to be less frequent in Lithuanian than in other languages: they make up about 0.2% (215instances) of the analysed 200,000 token corpus. Based on the number of different LVCs, there seemto be two groups of verbs functioning as light verbs: a relatively small group of common light verbsused in the most prototypical examples of Lithuanian LVCs (e.g., vykdyti ‘to perform’, atlikti ‘toperform’, daryti ‘to do’, and turėti ‘to have’) and a larger group of less common light verbs. Most ofthe nouns in analysed LVCs have suffixes -imas and -ymas, which are the most typical Lithuaniansuffixes for deriving a noun from a verb. Almost 40% of all LVCs are used with 1–3 words interveningbetween a verb and a noun.