Language, Individual & Society, Volume 19, 2025

Rezumat: Light verb constructions (LVCs), such as ‘make a decision’ or ‘give a smile’, are verbo-nominal structures in which the verb has lost its meaning to a certain degree and the predicative noun determines the meaning of the construction. The association between the verb and the noun is quite strong. LVCs usually contain high-frequency verbs, such as make, take, do, give, in their so called ‘light’ meaning. This paper focuses on a cross-linguistic comparison of the verbs make, take and give within LVCs in a corpus of English legal texts and a parallel corpus of their translations into Croatian. The corpus-based analysis of LVCs also considered the translation strategies used in the language pair. Since LVCs are often the result of the process of nominalization in different registers, it is expected that they will be quite frequent in the legal register, which shows a tendency towards nominalization. The study also explores the frequency and valency of the verbs make, take and give in the English legal corpus using word frequency lists and statistical measures of association between words. It then considers the translation equivalents in the Croatian corpus. The study contributes to the understanding of LVCs in this particular register, as well as the issues of translating such constructions.