Abstract

This study investigates Spanish light verb constructions (LVCs), or construcciones con verbo soporte, such as dar respuesta and tomar en cuenta in a seven-million-word corpus of contemporary newspaper texts from seven Latin American countries. I provide a detailed discussion of the procedure of compiling the corpus to ensure a balanced representation of newspaper registers. This is followed by a description of how the targeted verbs, dar, poner, tener and tomar, were identified and tagged using corpus analysis software. The results of the corpus search are analysed in terms of frequency, and selected morphosyntactic and textual features, such as the distance between components, tense, number and mood of the light verb, adjectival modification, article use, complex LVCs, and the occurrence of multiple LVCs. The results, supported by numerous examples in Spanish from the corpus, provide further evidence of the wide variation in form and use found among many LVCs.

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