What term refers to verbs that have little meaning on their own but can join with many other words to generate new meanings, sometimes called 'empty' verbs?

• A. Delexicalised verbs
• B. Phrasal verbs
• C. Auxiliary verbs
• D. Modal verbs

Answer: (A)

The idea here is delexicalised verbs. These verbs have very little meaning of their own; they don’t carry substantial semantic content by themselves. Instead, they supply a grammatical frame and rely on the accompanying words to carry the main sense. That’s why you can attach many different nouns, phrases, or particles to them to form new expressions, and the overall meaning comes from the surrounding material or the idiomatic construction rather than from the verb alone. Classic examples include do a favor, do harm, take a look, make sense, and so on—the verb is flexible and lightweight, while the content comes from what follows or from the whole phrase.

Auxiliary verbs and modal verbs play grammatical roles (tensing, aspect, mood, possibility) and aren’t described as “empty” in the same sense. Phrasal verbs refer to specific verb-plus-particle formations with their own particular meanings, which is related but describes a different phenomenon than the general property of bleached lexical content in the verb itself.