Distribution of object types of “light” and “heavy” early-learned English verbs

Abstract

In the developmental psycholinguistic literature, it is common to distinguish verbs that are semantically light from those that are not. One important reason is that the light verbs (take, get, make, do, go, etc.) - excellent substitutes for specific verbs and very frequent in adult speech to children - are thought to help children learn the verb system. Although quantitative and qualitative criteria (e.g., frequency, grammaticalization, semantic generality, high transitivity) have been proposed for distinguishing light and heavy verbs, some puzzling questions remain: how good are criteria that define heavy verbs as nonlight ones? Are verbs bimodally distributed? Do children's light and heavy verbs align with adult ones? This paper proposes a new candidate - using the number of objects (free associations and co-occurrences) a verb has as an indicator of its semantic generality - and applies it to 80 early-learned English verbs. The results suggest that early-learned light and heavy verbs differ in the breadth of the objects they are associated with: light verbs have weak associations with specific objects, whereas heavy verbs are strongly associated with specific objects. There is also a hint that some verbs have narrower associations with objects in speech from and to children.