On ek- as a Light Verb -A Contrastive View from Japanese-

The purpose of this study is to investigate if the Turkish verb ek- also has the role as a light verb in Turkish (i.e foto raf ek-, fotokopi ek-, ile ek- etc). In this study I also examined gapping of light verbs in coordination constructions and by using the same test on some ek- constructions I tried to improve that some ek- constructions have the same properties as the well-known light verbs like et-, ol-. We can observe the the same fact concerning gapping as in the case of ek- as a compound, neither backward nor forward gapping is unacceptable.In the second section I also investigated the ek- compound when it takes double objects, which might be unacceptable to some Turkish speakers, but they could be find in the Turkish youth language, which is an evidence of ek’s grammaticalization process. It is very interesting that double objects can be find also in the well-known light verb constructions as hasta-y muayene et- (to examine the patient) etc.It follows from this that some ek- constructions have a role as a light verb, some have idiomatic meanings and most of them have heavy verbal features. This study also shows some Japanese light and heavy verb data to make a comparison.