Studying light verbs in two Persian specialized corpora

Document Type : .

Author
Elham Alayiaboozar
Computational linguistic research group. Information Science Research Department. Iranian Research Institute for Information Science and Technology (IranDoc). Tehran.Iran.
10.30465/lsi.2025.49517.1772
Abstract
One of the topics examined within the framework of corpus linguistics is the compound verb. Compound verbs consist of two parts: a "non-verbal element" and a "light verb." In this study, the frequency of light verbs was extracted from two specialized corpora, " PAZHUHESHNAME" and "PEKA" (the corpus of IranDoc books), and the frequency of the top three light verbs in these two corpora was compared with their frequency in a general corpus, namely the "Persian Text Corpus."
In these two specialized corpora, which together contain nearly eight million words, the light verbs "zadan" (to hit), "dashtan" (to have), "kardan" (to do), "sepordan" (to give), "gereftan" (to take), "amadan" (to come), "dadan" (to give), "oftadan" (to fall), "khordan" (to eat), "keshidan" (to pull), "avardan" (to bring), "nemoudan" (to do), "raftan" (to go), "bordan" (to carry), and "andakhtan" (to throw) were analyzed. Among these, the light verbs "kardan" with a frequency of 5848 and "dadan" with a frequency of 5037 ranked first and second in terms of frequency. The frequency of these two light verbs is also high in the general corpus, where they rank among the top. The light verb "gereftan" with a frequency of 3246 ranks third in the specialized corpora. However, in the general corpus, the light verb "gereftan" ranks after the light verbs "kardan," "dadan," "dashtan," and "namoudan" in terms of frequency.
After extracting and examining the frequency of light verbs, compound verbs formed with these three light verbs (kardan, dadan, and gereftan) were also analyzed in terms of the likelihood of a gap between the non-verbal element and the light verb within a defined context (five tokens before and five tokens after the target light verb). The analysis of the behavior of high-frequency compound verbs in specialized corpora showed that authors of specialized texts, mainly researchers, students, and professors, are less inclined to place a gap between the non-verbal element and the light verb. Therefore, in most compound verbs, the non-verbal element and the light verb appear together without any syntactic category or group intervening. In contrast, in general texts, the likelihood of authors inserting syntactic groups or various categories between the non-verbal element and the light verb is higher than in specialized texts
Keywords
compound verb
corpus
light verb
specialized corpus
frequency of light verbs
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Language and Linguistics
Volume 20, Issue 39
January 2025
Pages 97-122