engleski

Iconicity of the verbal expression – the case of 'light' verbs in English

Iconicity as a unique cognitive mechanism seems to be a very useful tool in analysing phenomena when event schema, i.e. its symbolic representation in the canonical event model is blended with the polysemous distribution of the so called 'light' verbs, such as have, take, make and give. Sweetser (1997) proposes that complex predicates of the type 'light' verb + NP reflect the structural organisation of any linguistic unit more complex than one lexeme, which is, along these lines, itself a reflection of the rules ascribed to e.g. structural iconicity (e.g. plural of nouns) or diagrammatic iconicity (word order in nonflective languages). In our paper we shall investigate the role structural and diagrammatic iconicity have in construing event schemata through the periphrastic structure of complex predicates containing the above mentioned 'light' verbs and the bare infinitive forms of activation verbs preceded by an indefinite article. We shall argue that the structure reflects the conceptualised information of the event content, e.g. the short duration of the activity and its perfective character, as well as its Aktionsart force in the sense of the boundedness/unboundedness of the verb/noun space as proposed by Langacker (1987).

iconicity; light verbs; canonical event model; polysemy

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