ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the occurrence of Verb and Noun constructions in a corpus of contemporary fiction amounting to around 1.6 million words. It examines two limitations on the material namely: First, as regards Verb had ignored a minority of items such as do and the much bigger minority with make. Second, as regards Noun ignores nominalizations which are other than (a) isomorphic with the base form of the corresponding verb, and (b) replaceable semantically and idiomatically with the verb. The chapter analyses the whole material in terms of broad grammatical and semantic distinctions, to investigate contrasting distributions and co-occurrences as between the take, have and give examples. Indeed, since it is clear that there can be cases where monotransitive give may occur but not ditransitive give, the chapter separated for the purposes of analysis the instances with monotransitive give from those where give was ditransitive.
