German Light Verb Constructions in Corpora and Dictionaries1We would like to thank Christiane Fellbaum and Katerina Stathi for their comments on earlier drafts of this paper.

In this paper we explore the collocations and semantics of light verbs in German and propose a new kind of monolingual German dictionary entry for such verbs, paying equal attention to phraseology and meaning. As a rule of thumb, we follow the semantic criterion that the meaning of a light verb is more than usually bound up with its collocations (which, typically, are few in number and high in frequency). We consider problems of terminology and criteria. A corpus-based analysis of three verbs (leisten, erteilen, and hegen) is presented. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]