Simple versus Light Verb Constructions in Late Modern Irish English Correspondence: A Qualitative and Quantitative Analysis

This paper provides a qualitative and quantitative analysis of syntactic and semantic factors present in light verb constructions as compared to the use of verbal simplexes in order to determine predictors for light verb use. The data set consists of letters from the 1780s component of the Corpus of Irish English Correspondence (CORIECOR). Data has been extracted semi-automatically using AntConc and processed with R. A logistic regression of the results shows that modification of the predicate noun is the strongest predictor of light verb use in the data set, followed by semantic and aspectual differences between light verb constructions and simplexes.