Psych Light Verb Constructions in Old Catalan: Patterns and Contrasts with Present-Day Catalan

This study aims, first, to contribute to our understanding of the regularities of light verb constructions (LVCs) by identifying syntactic–semantic patterns and, secondly, to provide data and reflections on how syntactic analyzability and semantic compositionality interact to shape the diachronic evolution of LVCs. To this end, the paper analyzes and describes, through corpus research, a subset of LVCs from Old Catalan—psych LVC or those denoting emotional states—and compares them with those from Contemporary Catalan. The main contrast between Old Catalan and Contemporary Catalan in this domain is that Contemporary Catalan tends to place the Experiencer in non-localist positions. Localist metaphors no longer structure the form–meaning pairing of Catalan psych LVCs. Once these metaphorical extensions no longer link P(sych)LVCs to their dominating construction, what remains can be described as a situation of vacuous analyzability: linguistic chains that are syntactically analyzable but lack semantic pairing.