A Corpus-based Study On English Delexical Verbs

Delexical verbs(DVs)are commonly used verbs with weak semantic content and their meanings are expressed through the words collocated with them.As a special kind of verbs,they play an important and indispensable role in English.Previous scholars at home and abroad have carried out many related studies on English delexical verbs from both theoretical and empirical perspectives.Despite the accomplishments,the previous studies are not comprehensive enough to reveal the usages of delexical verbs.Therefore,it is of great significance and necessity to conduct this research.This thesis intends to throw some light on delexical verbs in hopes of improving the efficiency and quality of both the learning and teaching of English delexical verbs.The thesis has adopted the corpus-based approach,which is efficient and accurate in language study.The corpus used here is an online general corpus,the Corpus of Contemporary American English(COCA),which is currently the largest modern English corpus available.It can not only provide numerous reliable data for the present study but also serve as the retrieval and calculation tool during the researching process.This research has analyzed the authentic usages of DVs in COCA in light of Sinclair's work modal of the extended unit of meaning,namely 3C2 S modal.Specifically,it strives to find out the typical characteristics of use of the core word,those high-frequency DVs,from the aspects of collocation,colligation,semantic preference and semantic prosody.In order to achieve the researching goals,this thesis has made both quantitative and qualitative analysis.Firstly,this thesis has studied five delexical colligations,including “V+N”,“V+Adj”,“V+doing”,“V+P+N” and “V+N+P” by figuring out their collocational features and classifications.For example,the colligation of “V+N” can be further classified as “V+[*nn1*]” and “V+[*nn2*]”.Secondly,the author has gone further to investigate the high-frequency collocations of each colligation by examining their collocational features and register features.For instance,most of the collocations of “V+N” prefer the register of “spoken” English.Thirdly,the semantic preferences of “make,take,give,have and go” and the semantic prosodies of “get and go” have been explored.Taking “go” as an example,“go” used in “go+doing” prefers to collocate with words belonging to the semantic category about recreation or sports.When used in “go+Adj”,it generally tends to collocate with adjectives with negative connotations.Finally,this study has found out that there are collocational differences between the delexical verb “make” and its other three variants,namely “making”,“made” and “makes”.The present study has both theoretical and practical implications.Theoretically,this thesis has applied Sinclair's 3C2 S modal comprehensively,which will make certain contributions to the application of this theoretical modal.Practically,the discovery of the authentic use of those DVs will give instructions to both English learners and teachers.Furthermore,the summary of usages of DVs can also offer valuable insights for compiling textbooks or grammar books.Nevertheless,because the researching focuses are limited,it is impossible to cover every aspect and there still exist some limitations.More research in this area is needed to explore delexical verbs in a more complete and comprehensive way.