 Other names for "light verb" include "delexical verb", "vector verb", "explicator verb", "thin verb", "empty verb" and "semantically weak verb" (a "semantically weak" verb is not to be confused with a weak verb of the Germanic weak inflection, however).While light verbs are similar to auxiliary verbs regarding their contribution of meaning to the clauses in which they appear, light verbs fail the diagnostics that identify auxiliary verbs and are therefore distinct from auxiliaries.Light verb constructions challenge theories of compositionality because the words that form such constructions do not together qualify as constituents although the word combinations qualify as catenae.