Phrasal Verbs

Providing a detailed and comprehensive account of the development of phrasal verbs from Early Modern to Present-day English, this study covers almost 400 years in the history of English, and provides both a diachronic and synchronic account based on over 12,000 examples extracted from stratified electronic corpora. The corpus analysis provides evidence of how registers can inform us about the history of English, as it traces and compares the usage and stylistic drifts of phrasal verbs across ten different genres - drama, fiction, journals, diaries, letters, medicine, news, science, sermons, and trial proceedings. The study also sheds new light on the morpho-syntactic and semantic features of phrasal verbs, proposing a new approach to the category, considering not only their grammatical features, but also their historical development, by discussing the category in terms of a number of central mechanisms of language change.

This study explores the use of phrasal verbs in English language documents of the European Union (EU) as part of a larger-scale project examining the use of English in EU texts from various aspects including lexical, lexico-grammatical and textual features. Phrasal verbs, known to represent one of the most difficult aspects of learning English, are highly productive and widely used by native speakers. The purpose of this study is to identify the most frequent phrasal verb combinations in EU documents. To this end, an EU English Corpus of approximately 200,000 running words was built using texts which are representative of the fields of activities of the EU. The analysis revealed that the top 25 phrasal verbs account for more than 60% of all phrasal verb constructions in the corpus. The results also show that in terms of the frequency of phrasal verbs, EU documents show some similarity to written academic English. The paper also illustrates some instructional activities and the pedagogical relevance of the findings.

Adopting the Cognitive Linguistic (CL) framework, this study focuses on the particle placement phenomenon of English transitive particle verbs and its relationship with idiomaticity. Construal is argued to play a key role in determining which order a transitive particle verb should take. When a caused motion event or state change event is construed sequentially, the discontinuous order is taken to emphasize the final resultant state of the object. When the holistic construal is taken to view the same situation, the continuous order is adopted to profile the object or the interaction between the subject and the object. The holistic construal requires two conditions. First, the particle has a dynamic sense. It can designate both the process and the endpoint of motion. Second, the final state denoted by the particle is directly caused by the action denoted by the verb. In contrast, the sequential construal is allowed as long as a causal link can be established between the two participants under discussion or between the verb and the state change of one participant. In addition, the present study argues that the particle placement of idiomatic particle verbs depends on the processes in which the particle verb has developed its idiomaticity. If the idiomatic meaning develops from the inference associated with the sequential construal, the discontinuous order is preferred. On the other hand, if the idiomatic meaning is based on the holistic construal, the continuous order is then preferred. Moreover, item-by-item analyses of particle verbs that only allow one order listed in the Collins COBUILD Dictionary of Phrasal Verbs provide corpus-based support to the CL view of the relationship between construal, particle placement, and idiomaticity proposed in this study.

How can state-of-the-art computational linguistic technology reduce the workload and increase the efficiency of language teachers? To address this question, we combine insights from research in second language acquisition and computational linguistics to automatically generate text-based questions to a given text. The questions are designed to draw the learner's attention to target linguistic forms-phrasal verbs, in this particular case-by requiring them to use the forms or their paraphrases in the answer. Such questions help learners create form-meaning connections and are well suited for both practice and testing. We discuss the generation of a novel type of question combining a wh-question with a gapped sentence, and report the results of two crowdsourcing evaluation studies investigating how well automatically generated questions compare to those written by a language teacher. The first study compares our system output to gold standard human-written questions via crowdsourcing rating. An equivalence test shows that automatically generated questions are comparable to human-written ones. The second crowdsourcing study investigates two types of questions (wh-questions with and without a gapped sentence), their perceived quality, and the responses they elicit. Finally, we discuss the challenges and limitations of creating and evaluating question-generation systems for language learners.

Recent studies in different parts of the world have highlighted that phrasal verbs constitute a learning difficulty for English language learners despite their confirmed significance and high productivity in English. Proposed explanations include cross-linguistic differences, the complex nature of phrasal verbs, low language proficiency and psychological factors. The present study examines this difficulty among an Arabic-speaking population of Egyptian undergraduates in a foreign language context. To this end, a total of 407 Egyptian undergraduates in a private English-medium university completed a paraphrase task, two gap-filling tasks and a survey. The results confirm the difficulty highlighted in earlier studies, particularly at the production level. The results also show that the under-representation of phrasal verbs in the participants’ production can be interpreted in terms of cross-linguistic differences, passive learning for comprehension and limited language exposure. The study thus supports a multi-faceted model for the explanation of the limited use of phrasal verbs by English language learners, and calls for a revision of the English language teaching programs in Egypt.

The aim of this article is to examine gestural phrasemes in Marina Tsvetaeva’s poetry. It has been acknowledged that corporality, just like sexuality, plays an intensely ambiguous role in her works. Bearing in mind the fact that Tsvetaeva’s poems tend to be iconic, we expect the poet’s ambiguous attitude towards body to be reflected in how she works with phrasemes related to body movements. As a poet who is known for her maximal exploitation of language, Tsvetaeva – as formalists would say – defamiliarize non-free phrases (phrases that are constrained by the linguistic conventions) in order to foreground her interpretation of the world. While in our everyday speech great part of modifications of phrasemes is metaphorically motivated, in case of Tsvetaeva’s idiolect these modifications turn out be mostly motivated by her own craft.
Key words: gestural phrasemes, Marina Tsvetaeva, foregrounding, literary linguistics

Phrasal verbs, such as "run up" in "They always run up our electric bill," have long been of interest to researchers of English linguistics.  Scholars have been particularly focused on the definition and categorization of these multi-word items, as well as their grammatical, pragmatic, and semantic functions. Additionally, phrasal verbs have been examined historically, and recently corpus methods have been used to begin investigating phrasal verb frequency and patterns of variation across registers. But few studies have combined diachronic and register-based approaches to analyze the development of the phrasal verb in American English.

This study uses large, monitor corpora--The Corpus of Historical American English (CoHA) and The Corpus of Contemporary American English (CoCA)--to investigate diachronic trends in the development of selected phrasal verbs. Our investigation follows two lines of inquiry. In the first, we present an overview of the development of phrasal verbs in the last two hundred years. Our analysis begins with historical trends in the use of the most common adverbial particles, including their varied uses in different registers. In the second part of our investigation, we present a case study of the most frequent phrasal verb (pick up). This case study explores how the usage of a transitive phrasal verb is influenced by the histories of the nouns that function as its objects (how "phone" impacts the use of "pick up," for example). One set of data, therefore, provides a global view of developmental trends focusing on the adverbial particles, the other a close look at some of the grammatical, semantic and sociolinguistic forces that can influence the histories of specific phrasal verbs.

From these data, we discover that particular registers--fiction, most particularly--have contributed to the bulk of growth in phrasal verbs in American English.  But unlike many previous studies, we do not find unimpeded growth in phrasal verb usage: there seems to be a plateau in phrasal verb frequency after the 1940s.  We emphasize that such trends are observable only by consulting large, continuous corpora, rather than by aggregating smaller, disparate studies of different historical corpora.  Finally, we argue that changes in the frequency and semantics of phrasal verbs are due, in part, to changes in culture--especially fashion and technology--and the nouns associated with these cultural changes.

This thesis explores the difference between separable and non-separable transitive English phrasal verbs, focusing on finding a reason for the non-separable verbs’ lack of compatibility with the word order alternation which is present with the separable phrasal verbs. The analysis is formed from a synthesis of ideas based on the work of Bolinger (1971) and Gorlach (2004). A simplified version of Cognitive Construction Grammar is used to analyse and categorize the phrasal verb constructions. The results indicate that separable and non-separable transitive English phrasal verbs are similar but different constructions with specific syntactic reasons for the incompatibility of the word order alternation with the non-separable verbs.

The focus of the paper is on the semantics of English phrasal verbs whose constituent verb is related to the concept of PLANTS. The investigated set of verbs includes twenty-two phrasal verbs featuring the particles OUT, OFF, UP, THROUGH, IN and AWAY. The analysis is conducted in the framework of cognitive semantics, which states that the meaning of phrasal verbs can be analysed in view of their constituent particles and the interplay between the verb meaning and the particle senses. It is concluded that the general meaning of the examined phrasal verbs is a result of different spatial configurations underlying the conceptual-semantic structure of the constituent particles, while their specific meanings are motivated by different conceptual metonymies stemming from the constituent verb. Numerous abstract meanings are additionally derived via various submetaphors of the basic metaphor COMPLEX ABSTRACT SYSTEMS ARE PLANTS embedded in the conceptual framework of the constituent verbs.

This study investigates the effects of conceptual metaphors on Turkish EFL learners’ acquisition of phrasal verbs. The participants were 120 beginner, elementary, and pre-intermediate level students. The research follows a pre and post-test quasi-experimental research design. The students were assigned to proficiency levels according to their Michigan Placement Test scores. A phrasal verb completion test was used as the measurement instrument of the study. With regard to their proficiency levels, students were divided into control and experimental groups. The experimental group received cognitive linguistics inspired phrasal verb teaching (conceptual metaphors) while the control group was provided only traditional memorization method. Three paired samples t-tests were run in order to investigate the effects of conceptual metaphors in proficiency levels. In addition, a 2X3 MANOVA was conducted to investigate whether the method (traditional and conceptual metaphors) and proficiency level (beginner, elementary, pre-intermediate) have an effect on completion test of phrasal verbs (as measured by exposed and unexposed phrasal verbs). This study found evidence that conceptual metaphors have positive effects on the learning of phrasal verbs.

This paper examines the temporal semantic properties of English phrasal verbs with the particles down, off and up in the progressive aspect. The analysis includes testing of telicity, dynamicity and stativity components of meaning. The paper also enquires the influence of verb arguments on the change of aktionsart category as well as the commonest denotation of particles as they appear in the corpus examples. The results show that phrasal verbs, whose particles add to the meaning of telicity, become neutral towards this parameter when in the progressive, i.e., the particle acts as an additional aspectual marker in verbs that are inherently telic.

Phrasal verbs (PVs) are very common in English, indicating their usefulness in everyday settings. However, it was reported that language learners generally have great difficulties in understanding and using this linguistic form. This study investigated Malaysian learners' receptive and productive knowledge of PVs, and some possible factors which may contribute to their difficulties in understanding and using this language feature. A set of PVs test was developed and distributed to 480 secondary school learners in Malaysia to identify their receptive and productive knowledge with respect to PVs. Real data from the English of Malaysian School Students (EMAS) Corpus was used to examine the actual use of PVs by Malaysian learners. Results of the PVs test indicated that in general, Malaysian learners had an average level of knowledge of PVs. Analysis of the EMAS corpus revealed that they faced a lot of problems in the production of PVs. Some possible factors are highlighted which may contribute to such difficulties.

EFL textbooks, academic material, and language proficiency tests include phrasal verbs. However, many Lebanese high-school EFL learners reflect unfamiliarity with phrasal verbs and tend to avoid them in their language production. To this end, a twofold research was conducted. First, a corpus linguistics analysis of the Lebanese national EFL instructional material was carried out to map the occurrence of phrasal verbs and related activities. Second, an experimental research was conducted to investigate the impact of cognitive linguistics strategies on the instruction of phrasal verbs to EFL Lebanese high-school learners, through Google +. The utilized instruments were pre/post-tests, surveys, interviews, intervention tasks, anecdotal notes. In the first part, corpus analysis revealed that phrasal verbs occurred recurrently; however, related activities were seldom traced. In the second part, the results analyzed quantitatively and qualitatively highlighted the positive impact of cognitive linguistics strategies on the instruction of phrasal verbs through Google +; the experimental group outperformed the control significantly. Further research on a larger scale of participants can be done.

This paper deals with the meanings of two colour terms, namely English white and black and Serbian beo and crn. A contrastive analysis of the two pairs of adjectives is based on a corpus of 35 English and Serbian phrasal and clausal idioms, like Two blacks do not make a white in English and Od dva zla ne može ispasti dobro in Serbian. The main aim of the research is to point to stylistic and semantic aspects of two colour categories, white and black, in English and Serbian idioms. More specific aims deal with the meanings these colour categories express in the process of describing human characteristics, both mental characteristics and appearance, as well as determining whether such meanings are identical or similar in two contrasted languages. The analysis shows, furthermore, there is a high degree of correspondence between the two contrasted languages in respect of the expression of meanings of white/beo and black/crn which are culturally accepted in both languages.

Uma vez que os phrasal verbs são considerados pelos estudantes de língua estrangeira um desafio no processo de aprendizagem, considera-se neste estudo o fenômeno ‘construção verbo-partícula’ pelo viés da semântica cognitiva. O propósito é verificar suas peculiaridades no que tange às extensões metafóricas. A análise fundamenta-se nos estudos de LAKOFF (1987) e LAKOFF E JOHNSON (1980) e tem como foco as preposições espaciais up e down, apresentadas por esquemas imagéticos e que exercem um papel importante para a interpretação dos phrasal verbs.

This paper is on the Bangla verb type and especially on compound verbs, the rule of selectional restrictions of which is discussed here. The purpose of this paper is to ‘describe’ to understand the ontology of each Bangla Verbs (BV)type by drawing its factual existence in the world of Bangla discourse. There are four sections in this paper. Section-I is on the order of the Bangla Verb in a sentence. In the Section-II, predictability of Bangla simple sentence by identifying the verb is depicted. Verbs with one Participating Entities (PE) is a 0-group verb; if there are two PEs, the verb has the valency 1; and if there is more than 2 PEs, the verb will have valency 3. The valency of each verb can project the sentence-schemata. The further specifications (Functional Category, Theta-role, Case-marker, and Animacy of each PE in a given sentence) are to be predicted through this system of valency-scale. This scale also can derive the structure of the causative construction, as there is a one to one correspondence among non-causative, first causative and second causative base. Furthermore, this scale also solves the vital problem of identifying compound verb in a Bangla sentences. Section-III is on the different possibilities of Bangla Verb-combinations. Section-IV is on the rules for these combinations (particularly Compound Verbs, CV). In Bangla, more than one verb sequences are as follows:(1) V + infl. te and modals (Dasgupta, Dhongde & Rajendran in the context of Bangla, Marathi and Tamil respectively, 1981)(2) V + infi. e and vectors (Dasgupta l977 and 1989). These are generally called Compound Verbs. Matching of pole and vector gives a new meaning to the compound formation.(3) infinitives with the suffix -e and verbs. These are called conjunctives.(4) V +infl.le and modals: Hypothetical sentences. (5) V +infl.A and vectors: Lexicalized Compound Verb in impersonal passive construction. Beside these four types of constructions, there is another type of construction called Composite Verb Construction (Dasgupta, M. 1990) where a type of unique morpheme is created by juxtaposing noun, adjective and postposition with a selective list of verbs. This paper concentrates on the rules behind the construction of pole-vector sequences (i.e. the compound verbs).There is a valency-harmony in between pole, though vector and even a vector can reduce the valency of the pole. This ‘harmonization’ between pole and vector is semantically determined by the valency scale, if and only it one can subdivide every valency according to the pressure of semantic features like PE, Volitionality, kinesis of action, Individuatedness of the agent-affected or object-affected etc. Though Dasgupta (1977,1989) discussed some ad hoc rules at a length, though he himself admitted that there are some ‘cloudy area’. This cloudy area can only be removed by the multi-nary valency system. Considering every verb as a being, every pole-verb has to compensate their existential ‘lack’ by taking anyone from the selected list of vectors. Suppose there is a group of features f1, f2….fn, which verbs have contained within their existence these features are volitioality, kinesis of action, Indlvidua¬tedness of the Agent-affected or object-affected and so on. However, not all the verbs have all the characteristics. The pole selects its counterpart according to its need.

This book has three main aims: (I) to determine the usefulness of English phrasal verbs for L2 learners based on their frequency of occurrence; (II) to offer a comparative exploration of the most common phrasal verbs between spoken American and British English across the subgenre of television crime dramas, and (III) to show the crucial role that adverbial particles play in decoding the meaning of phrasal verbs.

Using chunks is said to bring about fluency into speech as they save speakers from constructing their speech upon a word-byword basis. Particle phrases (A term coined in this study to refer to phrasal verbs and their derived and deviated nouns and adjectives) are also among those chunks. This study seeks to see whether memorizing them will affect EFL learners' spoken fluency. To this end, 51 Persian speaking participants (37 females, 14 males) who were selected from 3 intact classes based on their performance in narrative video-based retelling constituted the sample of the study. The study was a quasi-experimental one in design because of the non-random assignment of the participants into either of the experimental and control groups. They were assigned to three groups: two experimental and one control. Both experimental groups received the same instructions on metaphorical concepts of particles (out, off, etc.) in the 150 phrasal verbs available in Garnier and Schmitt's (2015) frequency list. They both engaged in self-generated contexts except that those in the first came up with hands-on task of drawing sketches, too. The control group, however, received none of the above treatments. The results of a one-way ANOVA procedure in the immediate post-test indicated that the participants in the first experimental group significantly outperformed not only the control group, but also the second experimental group that made more relative gains than their counterparts in the control group. The outperformance of the first experimental group was also found in the delayed post-test, which represented the long-term effects of the methods. The findings suggest several implications for this vital but surprisingly neglected issue of engaging students with self-generated sketches.

The present work investigates the English transitive phrasal verb construction (TPV) and the reasons for its variable particle placement. Particles can be placed continuously or discontinuously in relation to the construction verb, e.g. turn off the computer and turn the computer off, respectively. Several studies
point out that noun phrase (NP) length (Hawkings 1994, Gorlach 2004, Lohse et al. 2004; Quirk et al. 1985) and idiomaticity (Gries 2001, Gorlach 2004) motivate particle placement. A study of particles away, off and out in TPVs is developed in favour of an account that considers specific constructions as chunks due to repetition. The hypothesis supported in this work associates loss
of analysability and gain of entrenchment between verb and particle with high token frequency. Thus, a TPV becomes a sequence with verb + particle packaged together and accessed as a unit in consequence of its frequent use (Bybee 2010). Written discourse data collected from BNC (British National Corpus) show a significant preference for the continuous order in spite of
constructions’ variable levels of compositionality and idiomaticity. In relation to particles away, off and out, there is a difference in frequency and range of verbs used with each particle: while away is part of only 8% of the data and
off, 26%, the particle out is present in 66% of all TPVs, which makes out both
the most recurrent particle in the sample and the one with highest type frequency: 96 different verbs were part of out constructions. Results also demonstrate that some verbs are used in both continuous and discontinuous order, whereas others are restricted to one construction only: take joins all three particles and in both orders, while carry is always immediate to out. NPs that follow carry out all bear semantic resemblance, indicating they form equential and indivisible units which seem to be motivated by the NP characteristics.



ATINER's Conference Paper Series LNG2016-2186

This study aims at investigating the frequency and discourse functions of phrasal verbs of go in the selected corpus. The corpus developed for this study was based on 5 short stories and 3 novels written by Hamid. It has 21 S,677 words in total. The reason behind choosing go as compared to others i.e., carry, pull and pick is its frequent occurrence. A total of 264 concordance lines were found with the verb go through language tool WordSmith 6.0 but not all of them were hits for phrasal verbs. Therefore, the researcher used 2 more language tools for finding out possible phrasal verbs with go in the corpus and then analyzed them qualitatively with examples from the developed corpus. The comparison between the dictionary meaning and contextual usage of the found phrasal verbs within the selected corpus showed that the author, Mohsin Hamid, has used phrasal verbs of go in his writings frequently. This study is helpful in enhancing the knowledge of phrasal verbs for teachers, students and future researchers.

Phrasal verbs are an important aspect and a challenge for learners of English as a foreign language (EFL). The aim of this proposal is to identify how the implementation of communicative language teaching activities may contribute to the learning of phrasal verbs in a tenth-grade course at a school in Bogota, Colombia. This project addressed the development and the implementation of communicative activities with a set of phrasal verbs with the particles "in", “away”, "down", "up", "off", "on", "over" and "out". This pedagogical intervention included activities such as board games, picture stories, storytelling and performance based on the communicative approach (CA). This inquiry attempted to recognize how the implemented activities allowed an alternative vocabulary learning environment from the communicative perspective.

Predmet istraživanja u ovom radu su slikovne sheme SADRŽATELJ, SILA, RAVNOTEŽA, CENTAR–PERIFERIJA, GORE–DOLE, i PREDMET (Johnson 1987: 126) u poslovicama koje sadrže somatizme u engleskom i srpskom jeziku poput, Place one’s head in the lion’s mouth / Staviti glavu na kocku. U istraživanju je korišćen korpus sačinjen od 30 poslovica engleskog i istog broja poslovica srpskog jezika. Cilj istraživanja jeste da se definišu metaforički pojmovni obrasci kojima je motivisana upotreba somatizama u posmatranim poslovicama, kao i da se predstave slikovne sheme kroz princip utelovljenja kao univerzalne kategorije. Kognitivnolingvističkom analizom pojmovnih obrazaca stiče se uvid u stepen sličnosti načina na koji govornici engleskog i srpskog jezika konceptualizuju apstraktne pojmove polazeći od delova ljudskog tela kao izvornih domena.