The study sees itself as a strictly empirical investigation into light verb constructions (LVC) in present-day German which focuses on the faits de langue in the Saussurean sense. It takes as its starting point ten functional verbs regarded in the literature as ‘typical’. As well as providing quantitative data, it also presents a detailed analysis of the contexts in which they are used – their internal and external valency. The analysis of the complements deals both with their syntactic form (description of the LVC patterning) and with the semantically determined combinations into which they can enter.