A Construction Study Of English Delexical Structure

Constructions，as a kind of form and meaning pairing, with their high frequencyof appearance, play an indispensable role in English. Scholars made a lot ofdescription and analyses on construction from the structural approach, thetransformational approach and the cognitive approach. But pervious study ofconstruction mainly fall into the typical ditransitive construction and caseconstruction, few of them concern to delexical construction. Moreover, the study thatadopts data-driven analytical approach has rarely been seen.Based on the framework of Construction Grammar (CxG), this thesis aims toconduct a research on the delexical construction from a combination of explanationand description, and of the qualitative and quantitative study which takes corpus asthe research basis. The corpus adopted in this study are COCA and BNC. This thesisattempts to explain the interaction between the delexical verbs and their constructions,and also tries to sum up the constructional meaning, or we can say the collocationpatterns after the delexical verbs, of four main kinds of delexical constructions. Inaddition, from the purpose of using and English learning, this thesis tries to explainthe reason for people’s preference to use delexical construction instead thecorresponding simple verb structure.