초록 열기/닫기 버튼
It has generally been accepted that the deverbal nouns (DVN, in short) of light verbs, as in ‘have a walk’, ‘take a ride’ and ‘give the floor a sweep’, are treated as unstable NPs in that those nouns rarely undergo syntactic operations such as wh-movement, passivization, pronominalization, and occurrence with definite articles, as suggested in Kearns (2002). Nevertheless, many spoken data from various corpora (COCA, BNC, WebCorp, etc.) reveal examples with DVNs, unexpectedly, taking other determiners or breaking their frozen status structurally, which provides the evidence to the contrary. This study argues that DVNs should be divided along the gradient scale with degrees of specification between ‘nouny’ and ‘verby’ poles. This gradient division can apply to the divisions not only between pure light verbs such as have, take, or give and vague light verbs such as make, but also between each of the pure light verbs. The study also demonstrates that the DVNs in many spoken data create a continuum where on the leftmost end lie the most verby DVNs allowing only an indefinite article, on the rightmost end the most nouny DVNs allowing even definite articles and in between the nouny and verby DVNs allowing plural forms, ‘the kind of’, ‘that’, and topicalization.
