A corpus-based study of valency sentence patterns of english verbs

Abstract

Based on the COCA, this paper investigates valency sentence patterns of the English verb APPOINT from the perspective of syntactic valency. And it analyzes the dominated components of verbs with the corpus linguistic method of collocation. It has been found: (1) The verb APPOINT has seven valency sentence patterns identified in the active sentences and fifteen patterns in the passive sentences. (2) The complement types associated with the verb APPOINT include subject complement, object complement, nominal compl ement with or without as, verbal complement with an infinitive or with to-be followed by a noun or a noun phrase, prepositional complement with the preposition to, by or for. (3) There is regularity existing in the complements. This present study describes valency sentence patterns of verbs, taking the sentence as the smallest research unit and verbs as the core of the sentence. The research results provide a new sight for second language teaching, especially for English vocabulary teaching.