Author Description

This book discusses support verb constructions and light verbs from the viewpoint of Natural Language Processing and makes suggestions how to formalize their lexical and semantic description. A wide variety of language specific and also cross-language theoretical approaches to the phenomenon are discussed. Based on the analysis of such constructions by M. Gross and I. Melcuk, the main concepts are distilled, and an example formalization is given in FrameNet. The approach to formalization is described with only a few minimal theoretic requirements, namely the distinction of a semantic and a surface layer of description, such that the basic concepts can be potentially utilized for a wide variety of grammar frameworks. In a separate chapter, a collection of tests is presented which allow delineating different types of verb-noun-constructions that are situated between fully compositional and completely frozen constructions. The result is a test battery for support verb constructions. Following the description of the linguistic tests, automated approaches to detect support verb construction candidates in large corpora are presented and discussed. Although a large number of experiments have been described in various papers and for various languages, none of the presented algorithms achieve satisfying results, which means that manual lexicographic coding of the constructions is still needed to select support verb construction and to capture their properties. The main focus of this book is on the description and classification of German support verb constructions, but English and French examples are abundant, and the linguistic concepts are described in a language independent way.