Abstract: This paper, with the help of the corpora, revealed the genre and diachronic frequency changes of the colligations of X+ADJ and X+V-EN typically used in durative linking verbs like "stay, keep and remain". The paper also made a corpus-based contrastive inter-language analysis between English native speakers and Chinese learners and explored their usage differences from the perspective of colligation frequency and semantic prosody. The result of the study shows that in native English, "stay" tends to be informal and spoken, "remain" formal and written while "keep" was evenly distributed and that the frequencies of "stay" showed an upward trend, "keep" remained stable while "remain" took a slight downturn. It is also suggested that compared to native speakers, Chinese learners had no significant differences in the usage of X+ADJ but underused X+V-EN and misused its semantic prosody. Therefore, this study ended with a suggestion that students should be encouraged to use various corpora during the vocabulary teaching and learning process.