The present study aims to reveal the use of high-frequency verbs "make" and "do" when they occur in a verb+noun combination in the argumentative essays of Turkish learners of English. In this context, the present study investigated the grammatical and semantic patterns and erroneous productions in the learner corpus. The investigation made use of a learner corpus and LOCNESS as the reference native corpus for comparison purposes. The findings showed that there were some similarities and dissimilarities among two corpora in terms of grammatical and semantic properties. Based on the findings of the current study and previous studies, the present study shared theoretical and practical implications particularly for language teaching settings.