Details
- Supervisors
- Faculty
- Degree label
- Abstract
- This dissertation investigates the use of 25 high-frequency lexical verbs shared across informal conversation, parliamentary debates, news reports, and academic prose. Using manually validated relational collocations extracted from Sketch Engine, it examines differences in the grammatical relations in which these verbs occur, the frequency and distribution of their relational collocations, their degree of cross-register sharing, and the semantic patterns of collocations within the object relation. The results show clear register variation in the grammatical and collocational patterns of the 25 lexical verbs, and this variation is both verb-specific and relation-specific. These findings provide insights into register-specific language use and have implications for second language acquisition and teaching.