Corpus-based Study On "V-ing+N" Noun Compounds

The present-participial modifier ("V-ing") is one of four major structural types of premodifiers in English, which plays an important role in language study. The study of "V-ing+N" noun compounds, however, still needs further study thus making a contribution to English Teaching and Academic Research.This thesis, in respect of descriptive grammar and corpus linguistics, aims to investigate the features of "V-ing+N" noun compounds, and identify their usages in English language.First of all, eight semantic groups of "V-ing+N" noun compounds (things, activities, states and qualities, people, companies and instructions, money and finance, technology and place) are categorized based on the frequently-occurring concordances from the American Brown Corpus. Secondly, the two components of "V-ing+N" noun compounds (the premodifiers and the heads) are respectively tackled semantically, functionally and phonetically. The premodifiers, deriving mostly from the verbs of short morphological construction and with more delexicalized meaning, fall into seven semantic groups, of which the group of activity ranks first. The heads are countable, concrete semantically and impersonal functionally. Last but not the least, the semantic relationships expressed by head nouns and premodifiers are classified and summarized accordingly, thus, the semantic prosody between the "V-ing+N" noun compounds and collocates are addressed. In summary, the findings of this research that possess certain theoretical significance and practical value, would be tentative for the study in the field of English Teaching in the future.