A Corpus-Based Study On English Delexical Verbs

Delexical verbs, with their high frequency of appearance and strong word-building capacity, play an indispensable role in English. However, due to a couple of reasons such as L1 interference, general verb effect, overgeneralization and neglect of collocational restriction, language learners, and even teachers find it hard to avoid making mistakes. Therefore, we can not give a deaf ear to deviant uses of delexical verbs. Researches on them must be conducted in time in hopes of improving quality and efficiency of both language learning and teaching.The appearance of corpus makes the study of delexical verbs much more feasible and accurate. As a tool for language study, corpus, which successfully avoids the disadvantages of the traditional intuition-based research and takes advantage of computer software in information extraction, data processing and collocation description, provides us with the real and authentic linguistic performance. This new date-based research method in modern linguistics observes the "naturalness" of data from genuine texts to provide better illustration of language features with higher efficiency and creditability and thus greatly facilitate language teaching, learning and research.Based on corpus linguistics, the thesis tries to conduct an empirical and comprehensive research on delexical verbs in ways of both quantitative and qualitative analysis, aiming at revealing in detail the usage of delexical verbs, including frequency, collocation patterns, register, semantic prosody and comparison among different variants of delexical verbs and the like, thus attempting to draw conclusions on the characteristics of English delexical verbs. Factors attributing to deviant use of delexical verbs are also explored in order to give rise to teachers, learners and researchers'awareness on those so-called simple verbs. All the endeavors are made to contribute greatly to the scientificity of both language teaching and learning and enhance the competence and idiomaticity of language users.