Diachronic Considerations
Light verbs are interesting to linguists from a variety of perspectives, including those of diachronic linguistics and computational linguistics. From the diachronic perspective, the light verb is said to have evolved from the "heavy" verb through semantic bleaching, a process in which the verb loses some or all of its original semantics. In this sense, the light verb is often viewed as part of a cline:
- verb (heavy) → light verb → auxiliary verb → clitic → affix → conjugation
In computational linguistics, a serious challenge is that of identifying light verb constructions, which require marking light verbs.
Read more about this topic: Light Verb