Traditionally, the term light verb refers to semantically bleached verbs such as take in English and suru ‘do’ in Japanese (Campbell 1989; Grimshaw and Mester 1988). It has acquired another meaning in syntactic theory as the head of a transitive predicate, represented as v (Chomsky 1995). The light verb v selects the external argument, heads a phase, agrees with the internal argument in phi-features (called the probe-goal relation), and assigns accusative case to the internal argument (Chomsky 2001, 2004).

In (1),…