Choosing an event description: What a PropBank study reveals about the contrast between light verb constructions and counterpart synthetic verbs

Light verb constructions (LVCs) in English and Romance languages are somewhat unique crosslinguistically because LVCs in these languages tend to have semantically similar synthetic verb counterparts (Zarco1999): e.g.make an appearanceandappear. This runs contrary to assumptions in linguistic theories that two competing forms are rarely maintained in a language unless they serve distinct purposes (e.g. Grice1975). Why do English LVCs exist alongside counterpart synthetic verbs, especially given that synthetic verbs are arguably the more efficient form (Zipf1949)? It has been proposed that LVCs serve an aspectual function (Prince1972, Live1973, Wierzbicka1982, Tanabe1999, Butt & Geuder2001), as there are telic LVC counterparts (e.g.have a thought) of atelic verbs (e.g.think). This proposal has been difficult to evaluate without a large-scale resource providing a markup of both LVCs and counterpart verbs. Addressing this gap in resources, the present research describes the development of guidelines for LVC annotation in the English PropBank (Bonial & Palmer2015). The focus of this article is the subsequent analysis of these annotations, aimed at uncovering corpus evidence of what contexts call for the use of an LVC over a synthetic verb. The corpus study shows that the general function of LVCs is not an aspectual one and provides distributional evidence that the ease and variety with which LVCs can be modified is the general motivating factor for the use of an LVC.