A Comparative Corpus Based Study in the Use of Verb Particle Construction
Keywords:
phrasal verbs, lexical verbs, adverbial particles, usage-based approachAbstract
The current study is aimed at exploring a highly creative yet challenging aspect of English language grammar, which is phrasal verbs (PV) in connection with particles and its construction, in a comparative manner among four corpora, in order to develop a clear understanding of how language users of different backgrounds and proficiency level deal with them. Since a language user-usage based perspective was employed for this study, with a particular interest in comparison of PWE with learner corpus (ICLE-Pakistani Content), the most frequently occurring hundred PV’s were extracted from PWE and then compared their occurrence in other three corpora (namely, BF, LF and ICLE-Pk). POS tagging was used to sort particles from prepositions and software AntConc was employed to extract total number of instances for each PV. The results showed that the among the three varieties (PWE, BF, LF) the most productive top three particle were similar, however, when it came to learner corpus results varied drastically, displaying that non-native learners avoid the use of PV in association with particles due to their confusing nature. It was also revealed in the research that internal variation occurred in three varieties with the exception of PWE only. Thus, the study concludes with pedagogical implications for teachers and learners for the use of PV.
References
Boers, F. (2000). Metaphor awareness and vocabulary retention. Applied Linguistics, 21, 553–571.
Bolinger, D. (1971). The phrasal verb in English (pp. 99–104). Harvard University Press.
Celce-Murcia, M., & Larsen-Freeman, D. (1999). The grammar book: An ESL/EFL teacher's course (2nd ed.). Heinle & Heinle.
Condon, N. (2008). How cognitive linguistic motivations influence the learning of phrasal verbs. In F. Boers & S. Lindstromberg (Eds.), Cognitive linguistic approaches to teaching vocabulary and phraseology (pp. 133–158). Mouton de Gruyter.
Condon, N., & Kelly, P. (2002). Does cognitive linguistics have anything to offer English language learners in their efforts to master phrasal verbs? ITL International Journal of Applied Linguistics, 137–138, 205–231.
Cuyckens, H., & Radden, G. (2002). Introduction. In H. Cuyckens & G. Radden (Eds.), Perspectives on prepositions (pp. ix–xxvii). Niemeyer.
Cuyckens, H., & Radden, G. (Eds.). (2002). Perspectives on prepositions. Niemeyer.
Dahl, Ö. (1985). Tense and aspect systems. Blackwell.
Darwin, C., & Gray, L. (1999). Going after the phrasal verb: An alternative approach to classification. TESOL Quarterly, 33(1), 65–83.
Gardner, D. (2007). Validating the construct of word in applied corpus-based vocabulary research: A critical survey. Applied Linguistics.
Gardner, D., & Davies, M. (2007). Pointing out frequent phrasal verbs: A corpus-based analysis. TESOL Quarterly, 41(2), 339–359.
Gehring, R., & Toglia, M. (1989). Recall of pictorial enactments and verbal descriptions with verbal and imagery study strategies. Journal of Mental Imagery, 13(2), 83–98.
Huddleston, R., & Pullum, G. (2002). The Cambridge grammar of the English language. Cambridge University Press.
Hunston, S. (2002). Corpora in applied linguistics. Cambridge University Press.
Kiss, K. (2011). Contributions to a semantico-contrastive analysis of verb particle constructions in English and verbs with coverbs in Hungarian. Debreceni Egyetem.
Lakoff, G. (1987). Women, fire, and dangerous things: What categories reveal about the mind (pp. 418–439). University of Chicago Press.
Lewis, M. (1993). The lexical approach (Vol. 1). Language Teaching Publications.
Lindner, S. (1981). A lexico-semantic analysis of English verb particle constructions with OUT and UP (Doctoral dissertation, University of California, San Diego).
Lipka, L. (1972). Semantic structure and word-formation (Vol. 17). Fink.
Melamed, I. D. (1997). Automatic discovery of non-compositional compounds in parallel data. In Proceedings of the 2nd Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing.
Nattinger, J. R., & DeCarrico, J. S. (1992). Lexical phrases and language teaching. Oxford University Press.
Palmer, F. R. (1968). A linguistic study of the English verb. University of Miami Press.
Palmer, F. R. (1974). The English verb. Longman.
Quirk, R., Greenbaum, S., Leech, G., & Svartvik, J. (1985). A comprehensive grammar of the English language. Longman.
Quirk, R., & Widdowson, H. G. (Eds.). (1985). English in the world: Teaching and learning the language and literatures. Cambridge University Press.
Rudzka-Ostyn, B. (2003). Word power: Phrasal verbs.
Published
How to Cite
Issue
Section
Copyright (c) 2025 Pakistan Journal of Language Studies
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
