A significant amount of work is needed in China to meet the standards of international palliative care societies. Palliative care training for nurses is still very limited. Nurses and other health providers who are engaged in palliative care should be well trained regarding the principles and procedures of palliative care to ensure quality care.

This article takes as its starting point the analysis of adjective complementation patterns and sets this in the context of other studies of phraseology, especially Construction Grammar. The article proposes that a large number of meaning–pattern combinations can be identified as constructions. This endeavour assists and is assisted by the derivation of a local grammar of evaluation. The grammar is made explicit in 22 ‘Analyses’, grouped into five main categories. It includes discussion around the process of mapping meaning on to pattern, the consideration of borderline cases, and the debate around naming of elements. This contributes to a comparison of different approaches to phraseology, and in particular to the place of Construction Grammar in relation to more output-oriented approaches. Suggestions for the application of this approach to language teaching are offered.

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This paper presents a local grammar of thanking in English, aiming to further demonstrate the feasibility of using a local grammar approach to account for speech acts and also to contribute to the on-going development of corpus pragmatics. The corpus used for the study is compiled of those texts categorised as 'Spoken-conversation' in the British National Corpus. Conventionalised realisations of thanking are identified and used as search terms to retrieve automatically instances of thanking. The retrieved instances are then manually examined to make sure that all instances to be analysed have the illocutionary force of thanking. The subsequent analyses suggest 7 functional labels that are needed for a local grammar description of gratitude expressions and identify 29 local grammar patterns. The implications and applications of research on local grammars of speech acts are discussed. It is concluded that local grammars can contribute substantially to the description of speech act realisations, and therefore more research on local grammars of speech acts are desirable and valuable.