(By Jeremy Collins and Jay Latarche): "A light-verb construction is a lexicalized complex predicate with two components: (1) a lexical stem which is not an inflected verb and (2) an inflectable verb, which is called the light verb. It is form-identical with a main verb, but used with a different meaning such that it ‘cannot be said to be predicating fully' (examples in English include give a sigh or take a plunge) (Butt 2003). ❡
Items that can occur as lexical stems in light-verb constructions are: (1) nouns (e.g. do baby in Ivorian English or have sex in English for ‘to copulate’), (2) adjectives (e.g. make beautiful in English), (3) non-inflectable items such as ideophones (e.g. do ssss for ‘to make an ssss sound’), or (4) verbs borrowed from other languages that do not inflect in the target language. ❡
Regular verbs cannot occur as lexical stems in light-verb constructions, in the Grambank definition. This makes light verb constructions different from serial verb constructions and verbal compounding, which involve a sequence of more than one verb. Another difference is that there is a predicate-argument relationship between the light verb and the other lexical stem (e.g. in do baby, baby is the object of do), while in serial verb constructions the verbs do not have a predicate-argument relationship between them since they instead describe a sequence of events."
An "inflectable verb" corresponds to a verb that can take inflectional affixes, but it seems that not all such verbs would count as "light verbs". And a notion of "lexicalized construction" is impossible in the Grammaticon, as it is forms, not constructions that are "lexicalized" (i.e. inventorized).