Light verb constructions

Abstract

This chapter focuses on a light verb construction (LVC) from both Portuguese and Spanish, dar conselho/consejo (“to give advice”). The chapter provides an overview of the literature both on the concept of light verbs and, in particular, on the syntactic and semantic analyses put forward by previous literature on Portuguese and Spanish. This literature on LVCs has focused on their syntactic analyzability, predicational nature, argument structure, and semantic compositionality. These topics are discussed and illustrated further in the section on present-day Portuguese and Spanish. The diachronic section tracks the evolution of the LVC. It concludes that dar conselho/consejo underwent no semantic change and only limited syntactic changes linked to their clause-taking abilities, mostly in Spanish rather than in Portuguese. This chapter explores a noun-based construction with limited changes, as opposed to the other constructions in this book, and one which reveals syntactic differences between both languages.