Light verbs features in European Portuguese Inês Duarte †* Anabela Gonçalves †* Matilde Miguel †* Amália Mendes * Iris Hendrickx * Fátima Oliveira α Luís Filipe Cunha α Fátima Silva α Purificação Silvano α Faculty of Letters † University of Lisbon Lisbon, Portugal Centre of Linguistics * University of Lisbon Lisbon, Portugal Faculty of Letters/ Centre of Linguistics α University of Oporto Oporto, Portugal isduarte@sapo.pt anajop@netcabo.pt tilde@mail.telepac.pt {amalia.mendes,iris}@clul.ul.pt foliveira@netcabo.pt luisfilipecunha@gmail.com mhenri@letras.up.pt puri_silvano@hotmail.com Abstract We present a study of constructions of the type <light verb + noun> in European Portuguese. We analyse these constructions as complex predicates where both the light verb and the noun share an important role in the predication and we focus on the aspectual combina- tory properties of the two elements of the complex predicate. We propose that light verbs inherit the feature specification of the corresponding main verbs, but that the light verbs are underspecified regard- ing (some of) the event structure features. 1 Introduction Constructions where a verb and a noun with predicative properties combine have been studied from different theoretical approaches. In these constructions, verbs have been considered i) light verbs as defined in Jespersen’s (1949) seminal work, ii) support verbs (Gross, 1981), in the sense that they have lost part or all of their mean- ing and have no predicative value in the con- struction, iii) auxiliary verbs with aspectual properties (Abeillé et al., 1998) or iv) a specific subclass of verbs that play a relevant role in the predication (see Rosen, 1990; Butt and Geuder, 2001; Butt, 2003; Samek-Lodovici, 2003, a.o.), also referred to as light verbs. In this paper, we will argue for the latter predicate-like approach on the basis of evidence from European Portu- guese. We will concentrate on the properties of sequences of the form <light verb + noun> headed by light verbs dar ‘to give’, fazer ‘to make/do’ and ter ‘to have’ (See examples 1). (1) (a) O presidente deu algumas orientações ao governo. ‘The president gave some orientations to the government.’ (b) O primeiro-ministro fez uma apresentação da nova lei no Parlamento. ‘The prime-minister made a presentation of the new law at the Parliament.’ (c) O presidente teve uma conversa com o primeiro-ministro. ‘The president had a talk with the prime- minister.’ We will take into account the interaction be- tween these light verbs, the aspectual classes of the verbs from which the nouns are derived and the final interpretation of the resulting complex predicates. 2 Properties of complex predicates of the type <light verb + noun> These light verbs behave like predicates insofar as they have their own argument structure, pre- serve the core lexical meaning of their corre- sponding main verb and exhibit some syntactic alternations of the same kind as the ones main verbs exhibit (as shown in Duarte et al., 2009). They are also sensitive to the aspectual class of the noun they combine with. Taking into account Vendler’s (1967) and Moens’s (1987) aspectual verb classes and extending them to deverbal nouns (Filip, 1999, a.o.), we observe that the light verb dar combines with nouns derived from predicates denoting points, processes, and culmi-