Light verb constructions (LVCs) are composed of two elements: a light verb and a coverb that represent a complex predicate. The coverb can be a noun, an adjective, a verb or a prepositional phrase. The focus of the present work of research is LVCs with nominal coverbs in Modern Standard Arabic (MSA). The work provides a characterization of the construction and explores its lexical, syntactic and semantic aspects. The findings of this work demonstrates that LVCs in MSA are compositional. Moreover, the elements of the composite are rigid and cannot be separated as the two elements represent a single semantic unit. LVs are distinct from the lexical analogues in terms of meaning and argument structure and this supports the argument structure view that the elements belong to two distinct entries. Furthermore, the study reveals two distinct classes of LVCs, which themselves incorporate unique morphosyntactic and semantic aspects: agentive and non-agentive LVCs. The study further highlights, beside agentivity, the e
Key words: argument structure, coverb, light verb, separability, lexical semantics.
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