Korean students tend to be good at not reading and writing but speaking and listening. There reason for that is English education in Korea focuses on improving communication skills now a day. To develop all four language skills-reading, listening, speaking, writing-in English evenly, it is important for students to internalize the usage of the lexical verb.
The seven types of English sentences are decided by verbs which have two general feature: strict subcategorization and selectional feature. Those features decide the type of English sentence and the complement of the using verb. Thus students can be outstanding in studying English, if they can acquire the knowledge of lexical verb complement.
The main purpose of this paper is to suggest the effective way to study lexical verbs in terms of syntactic and semantic information. That is, studying for the verb complement is helpful to reinforce the English skills.
There results from this study are as follows:
Firstly, the core principle of studying the verb is understanding the number of complement that the verb take is the main key of studying the lexical verb. It depends on the subcategorization of the verb. There is huge connection between the lexical verb and its complement in a sentence. Therefore, each verb chooses a unique argument that specifies the number of arguments that the verb can have. Secondly, the complement type needs to be focused on. There are different kinds of complement and the re are NP, AP, AdvP, PP, that-clause, wh-clause, to-infinitive clause, bare infinitive clause, etc. Because of the various complement type, students have to grasp a correct understanding of the complement type that the verbs take.
And lastly, each lexical verbs decides the type of complement. There are four types of complement according to this study: object, complement, obligatory adverbial and optional adjunct. To figure out the grammatical status of complement, initially classifying the sentence type, and to consider whether or not the verb takes the object, complement or obligatory adverbial as a verb complement.
Since the most important element in English sentences is the verb, one of the best ways to improve foreign language skills is to master the usage of verbs :There fore, students have to learn the semantic and syntactic features of the lexical verbs precisely to improve their authentic English skills.