CHAPTER THREE HOW LIGHT CAN A LIGHT VERB BE? PREDICATION PATTERNS IN V + NP CONSTRUCTIONS IN ENGLISH, FINNISH, GERMAN AND RUSSIAN MARJA NENONEN, JUHA MULLI, ALEXANDRE NIKOLAEV, AND ESA PENTTILÄ 1 Abstract This article discusses the predication patterns of VP constructions consisting of a verb and its NP complement in four languages – English, Finnish, German and Russian – with special emphasis on the semantic lightness of the verb in these constructions. The study consists of two parts. The first one examines the semantic nature of the verbal element in idiomatic VP constructions that include a body part noun. The results show that the most frequent verbs that exist in such idiomatic constructions are more or less similar in all four languages under discussion: they are fairly general verbs that have been named light verbs in other contexts. The second part of the article consists of a case study in which we take a closer look at a particular light verb, ‘take’, and analyze how the predicate meaning of VP constructions containing ‘take’ is distributed in the studied languages. The main aim is to look at how light or heavy the verb in the construction is. An additional aim is to test criteria that could be used as a helping device in this analysis. As a result, we come up with a continuum of verbal ‘lightness’ that contains different types of VP constructions which reflect different types of verbal weight. However, further discussion on this issue is still required. Keywords: light verbs, idioms, constructions, corpus study, English, Finnish, German, Russian