Syntactic Structure of Light Verb Constructions

Abstract

This paper provides a well-founded approach to the type of complex predicate where two syntactic elements serve as a single predicate in Czech. Czech complex predicates are composed of so-called ‘Verbe support(fr.)’ in the verbal part and predicative nouns in nominal part. This type of construction can be found inter-linguistically in many of languages, such as Czech, English and Korean that are typologically different. The study of the complex predicates lies in the question of ‘to what extent can the syntactic and semantic properties of multi-word units be deduced from the properties of their respective parts.’ This study examines the fundamental grammatical properties of Czech complex predicates, the lexical and semantic properties of the Verbe support as a functional category and the predicative nouns as a semantic core of the construction, based on their complex interaction in the frame of the constructions with light verbs.