Acknowledgements

The publication of this book is surpported by the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities. This book is based on the author's PhD thesis completed in 2015 at the University of Birmingham（the thesis title originally being A Corpus-Based Study of the High Frequency Nouns time and thing:Investigating the Role of Phraseology in the Construction of Meaning in Discourse）. The book mainly keeps the research contents from the PhD thesis; it changes the organisation and format of the thesis and updates some of the contents where necessary. Therefore, as this book comes into reality, I would like to thank all the people who helped me making the thesis possible and my PhD life an enjoyable one.

First, I would like to express my profound gratitude to my lead supervisor Dr. Crayton Walker for his guidance and for sharing his expertise throughout the PhD life. I would also like to thank my second supervisor Dr. Paul Thompson forproviding detailed and encouraging feedback on the PhD thesis. Then, I want to thank Dr. Jeannette Littlemore for her insightful comments on the chapter on metaphor. I am also grateful to all the other wonderful staff and PhD fellows at the University of Birmingham for their encouragement, and to the kind colleagues here at the Southwestern University of Finance and Economics for their support. Lastly, my eternal gratitude goes to my family who have always provided unconditional love and support. I dedicate this book to them.