A Study On The Acquisition Of English High-Frequency Delexical Verbs By The Chinese University Students

English delexical verbs,as a typical and marked verb category,refer to the high-frequency verbs that are followed by deverbal nouns as their objects to indicate a specific action, state or event. These delexical verbs include take, make, give, have, etc.,which take on less semantic content and mainly serve as grammatical categories in delexical verb constructions (DVC,henceforth). However, the dominance and productivity of English delexical verbs determine their important positions in English teaching and learning. In the past few decades, the scholars at home and abroad have conducted considerable studies on delexical verb constructions in many fields including second language acquisition, English textbook & dictionary compiling,translation & interpretation and cognitive linguistics, but the research results appear to be far from the actual application context in China and rarely bring about satisfactory products in the acquisitions of DVCs. In addition, there have been few studies on how the advanced Chinese English majors acquire delexical verbs and DVCs. On this ground,it is necessary to conduct an in-depth study on the acquisition of delexical verbs by Chinese English majors.The corpus linguistics approach and Contrastive Interlanguage Analysis (CIA)approach were adopted in this paper,and the linguistic data of three high-frequency delexical verbs make, take and have were selected from two corpora in this paper:Chinese Learner English Corpus (CLEC) as a learner corpus and Louvain Corpus of Native English Essays (LOCNESS) as a reference corpus. In case of ambiguous DVCs,Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA) was referred to for judgment. The paper focuses on the following issues:First of all, the paper compares the differences between Chinese English majors in St5 and St6 of Chinese Learner English Corpus (CLEC) and English native university students in using three high frequency delexical verbs including have, make, take and their corresponding DVCs.Subsequently,the paper attempts to figure out the causes of the deviant DVCs used by the Chinese English majors.Finally, the paper explores the pedagogical implications for the Chinese EFL learners' acquisition of DVCs.The research results showed that: firstly, significant differences exist between Chinese English majors and the British and American native university students,namely,Chinese English majors have the inclination to overuse the delexical verb constructions in terms of quantity calculation but with fewer collocation types than native speakers. Secondly, Chinese English majors and the British and American native university students used DVCs differently,as demonstrated in frequency and MI scores. Thirdly, many constructions of the three delexical verbs in St5 and St6 of CLEC are colloquial in nature even if they are from the essays, indicating the Chinese EFL learners' poor mastery of the delexical verbs in terms of register. Fourthly, with the increasing English proficiency, Chinese English major seniors (St6) make more progress than Chinese English major juniors (St5) in the command of the target DVCs but the data don't show significant differences.This paper embraces some theoretical and practical implications. Theoretically,this study contributes to the perfection of theories related to lexicology, semantics,pragmatics, syntax, corpus linguistics, etc. Practically, this study offers suggestions for English dictionary compiling, English textbook design, English teaching and computational translation.This thesis is limited in some aspects. Firstly, the study just covers three high frequency delexical verbs and the corresponding DVCs. In addition, the selected essays are mainly argumentative in nature, which may form the topic effect and cause the increased frequency of some delexical verb constructions. Secondly, the study combines the corpus-based approach with the statistics,but the comparisons of frequency, MI scores and statistical differences of the delexical verb constructions is far from enough. Thus, further research should involve questionnaires and interviewsfor the analysis of the cognitive and emotional factors. Thirdly, the study focuses onthe writings of the corpus without considering the characteristics of the DVC uses in the spoken language. In one word, the present research topic still has a lot to improve in the future research.