Let’s tak a guid lang luik at SCOTS: A Corpus-based Comparison of Light Verb Constructions in SCOTS and the BNC

Abstract

This chapter offers a usage-based description of Light Verb Constructions as represented in the SCOTS corpus. The investigation supports previous findings concerned with British and American English in so far as overarching constructional semantics are shared among varieties. The unhindered incorporation of typically Scots elements into LVCs clearly indicates that the constructions are a fully integrated element of this variety.Keywords: light verb construction, usage-based, dialectal differences, semantic idiosyncrasiesLight Verb Constructions (LVCs) such as have a quick look, take a pleasant stroll, or give a loud roar are complex verbal structures that are used pervasively and are experiencing a steady increase in usage in contemporary English.1 These constructions have been shown to be grammaticalised or conventionalised pairings of form and meaning in that they zoom in on particular facets of event-structure (e.g. agentivity) and serve particular discourse functions (e.g. politeness) when compared to their simple verb counterparts, i.e. look quickly, stroll pleasantly, roar loudly.2Only a few extensive and coherent corpus studies of LVCs have been conducted focussing on standard varieties of English,3 and as a sad sequitur there are virtually no corpus descriptions of usage and formal and semantic idiosyncrasies of LVCs in non-standard varieties of English. The chapter at hand offers a usage-based description of the constructions as represented in the Scottish Corpus of Texts & Speech (SCOTS), contrasting these findings with data retrieved from the British National Corpus (BNC).4 Our investigation will be concerned with the following questions:1. How frequent are complex verbal forms involving have, take, and give in SCOTS and what are their relative proportions?2. What items occur in the flexible, post-verbal slot of the construction and to what semantic classes do they belong?3. What typical Scottish elements are found in the constructions?4. How frequent are modified verbal stems and what modifiers are used to elaborate event-description?These research questions are motivated by several other studies we have conducted, mainly on the basis of two large corpora (the BNC and the Corpus of Contemporary American English) with the aim to present a usage-based portrait of the constructions and to prove or disprove claims found in the literature on these particular multiword units. Such claims have most often been arrived at solely on the basis of intuition or introspection, i.e. methods which may trigger research questions and hypotheses, but by no means allow for a complex analysis of actual linguistic usage, including dialectal variation and comparison of varieties. The study put forward here is a first attempt to compare the usage of the constructions in two different corpora, viz. the BNC and the SCOTS corpus, and to investigate the flexibility of a conventionalised pattern with respect to socio-geographically marked usage (i.e. Scots lexis and morphology). Before we present and discuss the findings of our corpus analysis, we will briefly describe the constructions we are interested in and make a few comments on our research methodology.Taking a quick look at Light Verb ConstructionsBeing so ubiquitous, LVCs have, of course, received considerable attention from linguists with highly diverse theoretical backgrounds. The first successful attempt at a coherent description and systematisation of these constructions (the focus being on have a V) was made by Wierzbicka, whose definition we took as an orientation for our compilation and selection of data.6 Following her description, we think the points below to be of particular relevance for any linguistic discussion of LVCs:1. The constructions consist of the crucial elements: light verb (e.g. have, take, give) + indefinite article a (+ modifying AdjP) + verbal stem.2. As regards the notion Tight verb', this term was originally used by Jespersen, as noted, and is still applied with - at times - varying degrees of conviction or purpose. …