Function and Support verb constructions in Slovenian naturalness theory

This study investigates Nominalization verb constructions (NVCs) in German, focusing on Functional verb constructions (FVCs) and Light/Support verb constructions (LVCs/SVCs). We evaluate their syntactic flexibility, semantic specificity, and processing complexity com­pared to base verbs (BVs) and free phrases (FPs) using Slovenian naturalness theory. Corpus analyses confirm that NVCs predominantly occur in less natural text types and grammatical environments. Experimental studies with Slovenian L2 German learners tested NVC process­ing. The results show that familiar FVCs facilitate processing, whereas LVCs cause process­ing delays due to deverbal noun complexity. These findings contradict the Underspecification Approach observed in German native speakers, and suggest that L2 learners primarily re­sponded to the presence or absence of a resource-intensive nominalization rather than deeply processing these constructions in the same structured and dynamic way as native speakers. Our results contribute to understanding NVC representation in the mental lexicon and the cognitive mechanisms underlying L2 processing.