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Abstract The productivity of light verb construction (LVC), a mismatch construction, poses great challenge to L2 acquisition. The current study uses self-paced reading to explore the role of exemplar representation in its productivity acquisition. We found that L2 learners’ processing of the novel usages semantically similar to a high-frequency LVC exemplar is faster than the dissimilar ones, though later than theoretically expected. We argue that the results are in line with the exemplar model. They show that L2 learners rely on the semantic analogy of existing exemplars to understand novel LVC usages, and thus acquire the productivity of LVC. The form-meaning mismatch of LVC and its other syntactic-semantic features also influence its processing. Implications for instruction are given based on the findings.
Key words: light verb construction (LVC); productivity; exemplar; L2 processing; L2 acquisition
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