cs.CL · 2605.10605 Copy arXiv ID · May 11, 2026 Save Where do aspectual variants of light verb constructions belong? Authors: Aggeliki Fotopoulou , Eric Laporte , Takuya Nakamura
Organizations: ILSP, Athena RC · 15125, Marousi, Greece · LIGM, Univ Gustave Eiffel, CNRS, ESIEE Paris · F-77454 Marne-la-Vallée, France
Abstract Expressions with an aspectual variant of a light verb, e.g. 'take on debt' vs. 'have debt', are frequent in texts but often difficult to classify between verbal idioms, light verb constructions or compositional phrases. We investigate the properties of such expressions with a disputed membership and propose a selection of features that determine more satisfactory boundaries between the three categories in this zone, assigning the expressions to one of them.
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Francesca Franzon, Nicolas Rosàs Gómez, Leo Wanner
1Universitat Pompeu Fabra (UPF)
Frequent verbs such as 'have' and 'make' can function either as collocates in light-verb constructions or as full lexical predicates, as in 'make a decision' vs. 'make a cake'. Whether language models represent this distinction, and whether such representations vary across languages, remains unclear. We introduce a large-scale controlled dataset in English, Spanish, and French, comprising minimally varying sentence series in which the same context contains the same verb in light-verb and full-verb uses. Two probing experiments show that language models differentiate between these uses even in minimal contexts and exhibit separable patterns across object types. We release the dataset, generation code, and materials as a reusable resource. The framework supports extensions to broader contexts, additional verbs, and other languages.