The Use of Spanish Light Verb Constructions in the Advocate General’s Opinions of the Court of Justice of the European Union

Abstract

Over the past few decades, increasing attention has been devoted towards the study of formulaic language, both in Lithuania and abroad. It is assumed that stable word combinations, rather than single words, are preferred in speaking and translating processes, which makes this study increasingly relevant. The idea of formulaic language is well reflected by light verb constructions as one of the collocation types, therefore this article aims to describe the use of these constructions in the analytic Spanish language. The article provides a theoretical overview of light verb constructions, their identification using the Sketch Engine computer program, and their usage in a representative-size corpus, compiled from the EUR-Lex database of documents from the original Spanish texts of the Advocate General’s Opinions of the Court of Justice of the European Union. The analysis of the use of Spanish light verb constructions in the analyzed text provided large objective data on their use, revealing the light verb constructions and their patterns typical to administrative Spanish. It has been found that the grammatical meaning of these light verb constructions is mostly represented by the following support verbs: tener, poner, dar, tomar and hacer. In combinations with nouns, these support verbs mark grammatical aspects such as mood, tense, person, and number. The frequent repetition of light verb constructions in the corpus indicates a standardized lexicon within the Spanish administrative language. In general, the high number of light verb constructions in the corpus reveals their importance in analytic Spanish, especially in the administrative legal language of the Advocate General‘s opinions.

Keywords

• light verb constructions
• corpus
• spanish
• „sketch engine“