Non-conflating Roots: The Syntax of Light Verbs and Complex Predicates in Ngarinyman
Bibliographic record
Abstract
A long-standing view of light verb constructions (LVCs) is that they fundamentally differ from regular verbal predicates (Jespersen 1940, Butt 1995). Underpinning this view is the idea that LVCs are complex, while regular predicates are simple (Butt 2010). However, neoconstructionist theories of syntax, especially since Hale & Keyser (1993), have taken the view that all verbal predicates have complex syntactic structure, comprising at least an abstract v/Voice head and a complement (VP/NP/AdjP or acategorial root) (Marantz 1997, Borer 2005a, Harley 2008). As a result, LVCs can be modelled using the same underlying syntactic structure as proposed for regular predicates, with the difference between the constructions reducing to surface level phonological exponence (Folli, Harley & Karimi 2005). I present evidence from Ngarinyman (Pama-Nyungan, Australia) that supports the identical syntactic analysis of LVCs and non-LVCs, obviating the need to resort to a construction-specific syntactic operation, such as Argument/Event Fusion (Butt 1995) or Predicate Merger (Baker & Harvey 2010), which is required to map two verbs with their arguments onto one predicate with a single set of arguments. I argue that Ngarinyman LVCs constitute the most transparent spellout of a regular underlyingly complex vP. Specifically, I assume an exoskeletal syntax (Borer 2005a,b, Acedo-Matellán & Mateu 2014) in which acategorial roots Merge with functional heads in the vP. In the absence of a further phonological operation (e.g. conflation) to produce a monomorphemic lexical verb, roots in Ngarinyman are spelled out separately by coverbs, while the span (Merchant 2015, Svenonius 2020) of functional heads in the vP is spelled out by a light verb. I show that this analysis explains asymmetries between light verbs and coverbs, which are unexplained in approaches that treat them both as verbs. I further argue that this analysis accurately predicts the argument structure of Ngarinyman LVCs, which can be modelled solely on the light verb. This proposal entails that Ngarinyman light verbs remain ‘light’ even when they appear in non-LVCs as a so-called ‘heavy verb’ (see Ramchand 2014), correctly predicting Butt’s Generalisation (Butt 2003, Butt & Lahiri 2002). Implications for other languages are discussed.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".