A Corpus-Based Study Of Delexicalization In English And Chinese

Delexicalization is a widespread phenomenon and also a central semantic tendency for high frequency words in corpora.After a critical review of previous studies on delexicalization focused on the features of a few delexicalized words, this paper presents a corpus-based study of delexicalization in both English and Chinese. Based on the data of delexicalized words, make and zuo, jinxing, zuochu, scientific, illegal and kexue (de), feifa (de), extracted from English and Chinese corpora, the semantic and structural patternings are investigated, within the theoretical frameworks of Shared Meaning mechanism. Results show that delexicalized words have, to varying degrees, lost their original semantic content and displayed a strong tendency of delexicalization.Besides, theories of grammaticalization, theories of lexis and theories of attitudinal meanings are adopted to account for the phenomenon of delexicalization. And results suggest that delexicalization is a necessary condition for grammaticalization but not everything of it, whereas phraseological tendency in language use is an inevitable outcome of co-selection. Attitudinal meaning is a major pragmatic motivation for the use of semantically redundant delexicalized words. It is argued that delexicalized words take on special roles of realizing attitudinal meanings by way of intensification.