Phrasal Verbs

The paper presents pedagogical implications of theoretical research into phrasal verbs, a common problem for learners of English. As they do not constitute a homogenous semantic group, their learning can be facilitated by focusing on semantic patterns and associated syntactic behaviour. The attention of Slovak students should be drawn to the parallels between English verbal particles and Slavic verbal prefixes.

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.

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.

Le espressioni multiparola costituiscono una parte fondamentale del nostro lessico mentale, nonché l’oggetto di studio privilegiato di discipline applicative come la linguistica computazionale, la fraseologia e la lessicografia.
All’interno della linguistica teorica, tuttavia, queste strutture vengono spesso relegate alla periferia della grammatica per via delle loro irregolarità semantiche e strutturali e per il fatto di essere, al contempo, un caso «non canonico» e di morfologia e di sintassi.
Nel volume si analizzano le espressioni multiparola della lingua italiana, e in particolare le parole sintagmatiche (borsa di studio, gratta e vinci, tirare avanti, porta a porta), da un punto di vista teorico e descrittivo, mirando a esplicitare i meccanismi che soggiacciono all’organizzazione di questa porzione di lessico mentale e a metterne in evidenza le (sotto-)regolarità.
Per l’analisi vengono utilizzati (e in parte ulteriormente affinati) gli strumenti d’analisi messi a disposizione dal costruzionismo, un quadro teorico che elegge la «costruzione» ‑ intesa come segno linguistico, ovvero come associazione convenzionalizzata di una forma e di un significato - a unità fondamentale dell’analisi linguistica, mettendo quindi in secondo piano il ruolo dei livelli strutturali classici.

Teaching English Phrasal Verbs to Non-native Speakers of English
Ali Yunis Aldahesh
The University of Sydney

Abstract:
Researchers as well as learners of English language agree, to a great extend, that the phenomenon of English phrasal verbs (e.g., to break up, to give in, to get away with) (henceforth EPVs) poses a great deal of challenge to non-native speakers who want to learn the language and for interpreters/translators who involve in interpreting/translating them from and/or into the English language. Therefore, successful methods of teaching such complex English expressions to non-native speakers would undoubtedly help facilitate the process of learning them and in turn interpreting/translating them from and/or into English. Scholars from such domains as linguistics, lexicography and pedagogy have at length addressed the issue of teaching EPVs to non-native speakers and come up with a number of practical methods. In this paper this vital issue will be carefully investigated and the methods and materials used for teaching EPVs will be explored.
Keywords: Phrasal Verbs, Linguistics, Pedagogy, Teaching Methods, Teaching Materials

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 purpose of this study was to investigate the use and avoidance of English phrasal verbs by Saudi EFL learners and to examine teachers' perception towards the teaching and inclusion of English phrasal verbs in the present textbooks. To find answers to the questions of the study, 102 EFL female students were tested through the use of multiple-choice test, which included literal and non-literal phrasal verbs. Moreover, a questionnaire was administered to 71 English teachers at intermediate schools, secondary schools, and preparatory year program at universities. The study's results revealed the tendency of Saudi EFL students to avoid using phrasal verbs and exhibited the significant preference towards using its one-word counterparts. The questionnaire's findings revealed teachers' somewhat negative perception and awareness concerning the importance of teaching phrasal verbs. The results also exhibited teachers' incomplete satisfaction with the current state of phrasal verbs content in textbooks, which suggests a further look at the scenario of English phrasal verbs in the current English textbooks.

Chinese language has almost one character per every word, therefore the memorization and the active use of the language for a speaker with a native Indo-European language background must be harder than for a Chinese person. Nonetheless, Matteo Ricci, a Jesuit missionary to China, was able to teach Chinese thanks to an ancient mnemonic method, which he transformed and applied to Chinese. I will search in history for the connection of this method with the field of languages, and apply this old method in teaching English words to a modern secondary school classroom. By doing this, I will try to prove whether this ancient mnemonic method, used in the 16th century by Matteo Ricci in China, is still applicable in today’s secondary school teaching environment, where I will focus on acquiring words in English as a foreign language.

This paper presents a corpus-based approach to semi-automatic extraction of English phrasal verbs, very productive, but complex and often non-transparent lexical units, via particles (prepositions, adverbs) they consist of and which are among the top-ranking functional words in the list of running words of the British National Corpus (BNC). The research is carried out on a comparable English corpus of publicly available legal texts consisting of 392 255 words and using WordSmith Tools 6.0. The evaluation of the system efficiency is conducted via the statistical measures of Precision, Recall and F-measure, whereas the list of phrasal verbs is checked against the reference source Cambridge Phrasal Verbs Dictionary (2015). The results show that the process of semi-automatic extraction of phrasal verbs requires a considerable human intervention as well as control via their verbal segments since it revealed instances of wrong phrasal verb usage. Furthermore, the results point to the low frequency of phrasal verbs in legal texts since they account for only 2% in the total number of words, and their unequal distribution since 5 most frequent phrasal verbs account for nearly half, and 25 for more than 90% of all such items. Finally, tendency towards nominalisation of phrasal verbs, which is in line with the nature of legal language, is evident, especially in the texts originally written in English.

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.

COPULA OMISSION BY EFL ARAB LEARNERS
Copula omission is found to be one of the major and most frequent errors that
Arab EFL learners make when writing in English. Several studies have examined copula
omission by Arab EFL learners. Most of those studies have concluded that copula
omission is the result of negative transfer from Arabic to English since Arabic and
English is​ structurally far different. The present study investigates the phenomenon of
copula omission by Saudi EFL learners. It also examines whether the negative transfer
from Arabic to English leads to copula dropping by Arab learners.
Data were collected from 100 Saudi students at Qassim University in Saudi
Arabia. The participants were 100 Saudi male students of whom 50 were enrolled at the
intermediate level, or the 3rd level, at the English department at Qassim University and
the other 50 were enrolled at the advanced 7th level at the same department. The
participants were asked to write an essay describing themselves, their family members,
where they were born, the city they grew up in, how old they were, how old their parents
and siblings were, the city they lived in currently, and also about their ambitions and
plans for the future.
The results of this study revealed that the participants made errors by deleting the
English copula. The statistical analysis showed that the copula omission was more
frequent in the present and past tenses. The findings also revealed that intermediate
students make more errors than advanced students. There was a significant difference between the advanced and intermediate participants as regards the number of errors in the present and future tenses. The study ends with pedagogical implications, limitations, and suggestions and recommendations for future research.

The aim of this article is to study the verb valency of the Sumerian expression ni r ĝal2. The attestations point to two different meanings that are related to different arguments. It is suggested that the basic meaning of nir ĝal2 is „to give off an aura of authority; show authority“. The comitative argument indicates thanks to whom, the ablative argument by means of what someone shows authority. The meaning „to trust“ would result from a valency expansion, which can be traced to at least the beginning of the second millennium and could have been influenced by the construction of the Akkadian verb takālu „to trust“. The object of trust is expressed by means of the terminative (things) and dative (persons) arguments. The locative is mostly used as a peripheral argument expressing the place or situation in which someone shows authority.

The objective of this research is to find out the students' translation techniques regarding the phrasal verbs whether or not they are aware that translating phrasal verbs requires comprehension towards the meaning from combination of the verbs and particles constructing them and moreover to know how accurate their translation is. The researcher used descriptive qualitative technique in this study and conducted a test to collect data of students' translation. The students' translation techniques were analysed using the adaptation of Larson's, Newmark's, Molina's and Albir's translation categorization. Meanwhile, the accuracy was assessed using Nababan's translation accuracy rating instrument. The result of this study reveals that students use literal and semantic translation to translate phrasal verbs and the most dominant technique used by the students is Semantic Translation with 83%. Meanwhile, literal translation is only 11% and 6% is not translated. From the accuracy, majority of students accurately translate the phrasal verbs with percentage of 42%. Inaccurate translation is 39%, less accurate 13%, and not translated 6%. Majority of semantic translation is accurate with 51% while 35% inaccurate. Meanwhile, 84% of literal translation is inaccurate with only 5% is accurate. Therefore, majority of students' translation of phrasal verbs is accurate and dominated by semantic translation technique.

Ce travail a pour but une analyse du passage de la codification de notions spatiales à la codification de valeurs tempo-aspectuelles dans la formation des préverbes en latin (§ 4; 6.2). Cette analyse sera liée à la présence de « verbes à particule » aussi dans beaucoup de langues indo-européennes (§ 2 ; 5) que dans des phases cruciales de l’évolution du latin (§ 3; 6.1).

The paper deals with the analysis of the English phrasal verbs with the particles down and up and their Serbian translation equivalents. The general aim of the analysis is to point to the English phrasal verbs with the particles down and up and their expected Serbian translations in the form of prefixed verbs. Furthermore, more specific aims deal with the elaboration on the verbal categories of aspect and aktionsart (especially the feature of telicity) and the levels of idiomaticity of the English phrasal verbs as well as their Serbian translations. The theoretical framework used in the paper is the cognitive approach to phrasal-verb semantics. The results of the analysis show that the Serbian translation equivalents of the English phrasal verbs with the particle up are mostly perfective prefixed verbs whereas imperfective prefixed verbs are rather rare. In order to compare the English phrasal verbs and their Serbian translations, a contrastive analysis was performed on the corpus of 111 phrasal verbs with the particles down and up, collected from the second part of Hilary Mantel's novel Wolf Hall and its Serbian translation Vučje leglo (translated by Vladimir D. Janković).

The aim of this paper is to investigate Polish equivalents of English phrasal verbs as found in an English-Polish (E-P) parallel corpus PHRAVERB. Given the semantic idiosyncrasy exhibited by phrasal verbs, it is assumed that the equivalents generated by PHRAVERB will often differ from those found in E-P dictionaries. The qualitative corpus analysis aims to show that arriving at the desirable Polish counterpart involves a detailed semantic breakdown of the English structure, a careful analysis of the context in which it is used, as well as linguistic and translation skills, necessary to detect the nuances and subtleties of meaning in both languages. PHRAVERB is used to analyze the lexicographic potential (LP) of corpus equivalents. Four levels of LP have been established – high, average, low and zero – to evaluate which corpus-derived equivalents are eligible for inclusion in E-P dictionaries. To this end, 2,514 occurrences of PVs in the parallel corpus, with their equivalents, have been identified and analyzed.

The theory of situation-type aspect based on scales (e.g. Tenny 1994; Jackendoff 1996; Rappaport Hovav 2008; Rappaport Hovav and Levin 2010) is applied in the present study to aspectual English verb particles and Slovak verbal prefixes. I argue that both particles and prefixes come in two types, non-scalar and scalar, depending on how they describe the change denoted in the verb root. Non-scalar particles and prefixes do not alter argument structure, e.g. The children walked (on) in silence. They appear in predicates without an underlying scale, which are consequently atelic. In contrast, scalar particles and prefixes appear in predicates with an underlying scale, which are potentially telic. Scalar prefixes and particles can alter argument structure because scales require an obligatory realization of the measured participant, e.g. Ally slept *(off) a headache. The study reviews manifestations of argument-structure alternations as well as factors that determine the effect of particles and prefixes on telicity.

English aspectual particles in phrasal verbs have been since Brinton (1985) commonly treated as markers of telicity, i.e. markers of an inherent endpoint of events, e.g. eat (atelic) – eat up (telic). The present paper tests this assumption on 100 aspectual phrasal verbs with ten different particles. Minimal pairs of sentences with and without particles have been created and tested by two of Dowty’s (1979) aspectual tests. For these tests acceptability judgments have been elicited from native speakers. The paper points out methodological problems which should be taken into consideration in any study that relies on eliciting acceptability judgments. Most importantly, the results of the present study suggest, contra what is standardly assumed, that aspectual particles are not primarily markers of telicity. Instead, particles contribute other aspectual and non-aspectual meanings.

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.

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.