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Going After the Phrasal Verb: An Alternative Approach to Classification
Abstract
This article critiques past approaches to identifying phrasal verbs and proposes an alternative approach. Instead of requiring verb + particle combinations to demonstrate specific features in order to be identified as phrasal verbs, the new approach calls for researchers and teachers to consider all verb + particle combinations to be potential phrasal verbs until they can be proven otherwise. This approach clarifies the process of classifying phrasal verbs and eliminates curriculum-based problems encountered by students.
... Many names have been employed to describe this specific language form, including 'separable verbs,' 'two-word verbs,' and 'verb-particle groupings' [7][8][9][10][11]. Nevertheless, the phrase "phrasal verb" would be employed in this research since this definition is one that scholars of this language most frequently use [12][13][14]. Phrasal verbs are a broad notion used in reference materials, training, and education settings (textbooks, dictionaries, course books). ...
... Given that Bolinger [37] asserts that "being or not being a phrasal verb is a matter of degree," Darwin and Gray [12] classification of PVs may be a complex matter. Scholars must agree on a description. ...
... Though this kind of test is certainly factual for the most common phrasal verbs' transitivity, according to Darwin and Gray [12], several transitive phrasal verbs do not have passive tenses, such as: ...
The present paper examines the syntactic features of phrasal verbs among EFL students. The main objectives of conducting this study are to recognize those syntactic features associated with language acquisition and to review the syntactic structures of these phrasal verbs. In doing so, it is designed as a descriptive case study of this phenomenon within its context. In particular, the study examines how these phrasal verbs are arranged, and it presents a full description of these features. The analysis revealed that the syntactic features of phrasal verbs are difficult to comprehend for second language learners due to the various categories related to their structure, especially the separable/inseparable category. To conclude, there are many syntactic criteria based on which PVs can be categorized in terms of structure; this includes transitive/intransitive and separable/inseparable. Also, this paper highlights the distinction between phrasal verbs and prepositional phrasal verbs. Thus, all students should acquire at least an open awareness, enabling them to comprehend the PVs they encounter in spoken and non-spoken texts. Students who want to be proficient language users must be able to produce at least the more general PV combinations in a meaningful manner. Finally, this paper proposes that, as lexical items, phrasal verbs are certainly one of the greatest problematic challenges in language acquisition.
... followed by fill-in-the-blanks or matching exercises, is commonly criticized in the literature (Darwin & Gray, 1999;Gardner & Davies, 2007;Tyler & Evans, 2004), since it paves the way for mere memorization and rote learning without semantic and conceptual analysis (White, 2012). Thus, an explicit, systematic semantic presentation of PVs is needed to help language learners conceptualize these constructions. ...
... As previously mentioned, phrasal verbs in the English language are notorious for being particularly challenging, especially for ESL/EFL students (Kurtyka, 2001;Gardner & Davies, 2007;White, 2012;Güzel, 2014;Güleryüz Adamhasan, 2014;Saltık, 2014). One significant reason for this challenge arises from the lack of consensus regarding the terminological definition of PVs, leading to conflicting results in their application (Darwin & Gray, 1999). Although PVs are typically defined as verb + particle combinations that act as single verbs, there is ongoing debate as to whether verb + particle combinations should be considered PVs or free combinations (such as "drink up") (p. ...
... Consequently, this definitional confusion results in challenges for teachers and students in correctly using PVs, including the movement of particles in separable and inseparable transitive PVs. Darwin and Gray (1999) exemplify this confusion by highlighting that if language learners are told that particles in PVs cannot be placed at the beginning of the phrase, but they encounter PVs like "improve on" and "go down" that allow particle fronting, it is likely to cause confusion and lead learners to avoid using PVs. ...
The primary objective of this research is twofold: first, to elucidate the explicit teaching of phrasal verb constructions within the framework of conceptual metaphor theory, with a specific focus on the metaphorical aspects of particle usage, and second, to examine the correlation between such explicit instruction in phrasal verbs and the gains in implicit knowledge of these verb forms. This study employed a within-group pretest/posttest design as part of an experimental investigation involving 60 Turkish English as a Foreign Language (EFL) learners who were students at the School of Foreign Languages (SFL) at a state university in Turkey. The research was analyzed across three dimensions: the achievement and retention of both receptive and productive knowledge of phrasal verbs, subconscious recognition and processing of lexical items, and the processing of phrasal verb meanings in a semantic context. To assess the first dimension, a multiple-choice test to gauge the students' receptive understanding of phrasal verbs and a c-test to measure their controlled productive knowledge of these verb forms were administered at three points: the initial pretest, an immediate posttest, and a delayed posttest. A masked repetition priming lexical decision task was utilized to investigate the subconscious recognition and processing of lexical items. Additionally, a self-paced task was employed to scrutinize the participants' semantic processing of phrasal verb meanings. The study's findings revealed that the explicit presentation of phrasal verb knowledge within the conceptual metaphor framework significantly impacts not only the acquisition and retention of receptive and productive knowledge but also the subconscious recognition and processing of lexical items, as well as the semantic priming of phrasal verb meanings, which substantiates the influential role of conceptual metaphors in the lexical aspects of language learning.
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... The learners generally have difficulty and tend to avoid non-transparent PVs (Barekat & Baniasady, 2014;Ghabanchi & A limited number of studies have been done in analyzing PVs in teaching materials (Akbari et al., 2021;Koprowski, 2005;Strong & Boers, 2019;Zarifi, 2013). Several educators and linguists (e.g., Cornell, 1985;Darwin & Gray, 1999;Gardner & Davies, 2007;Moon, 1997;Strong & Boers, 2019) criticized the approach PVs are presented in textbooks. The PVs are usually listed in individual sentences with their definitions or translations in parentheses and are followed by gap-fill exercises. ...
... Such a way of presentation expects memorization rather than any semantic analysis. Grouping PVs together according to the lexical verb is also criticized by Darwin and Gray (1999), who pointed this out as "one reason for a limited understanding of phrasal verbs" (p. 67). ...
... (1) Each textbook was closely read to identify the PVs. Darwin and Gray"s (1999) five semantic and syntactic tests -particle repetition, where question, fronting, verb insertion, adverb insertion -and Armstrong"s (2004) separability and bare pronoun tests were consistently followed in differentiating PVs from prepositional verbs. ...
This study aims to promote the learning of phrasal verbs (PVs) of Vietnamese low-intermediate adult English-as-a-foreign language (EFL) learners. Thirty-one students were involved in the study over an eleven-week span. In this study we adopted an action research design with a four-stage procedure, including planning, acting, observing and reflecting. The planning stage starts with exploring how PVs are introduced in the textbooks through document analysis and investigating the students" current knowledge of PVs thorough diagnose text. The acting stage goes with implementing some measures to raise the students" awareness of the syntactic and semantic features of this lexico-grammatical area and to increase their uptake of PVs through both incidental and intentional learning. The observing phase works on systematically and continually evaluating the effectiveness of the action taken through regular, progressive tests and in-class discussion. The effectiveness of the treatment was measured with pre-, immediate post-, and delayed post-tests in a form of gap filling multiple choice individual sentences. The final stage is reflecting-mirroring the gains and limitations of the teaching and testing techniques implemented. The results of this study reveal a constrained depiction of the PVs in certain aspects, echoing concerns highlighted in prior research. The findings propose that the integration of PV instruction into the comprehensive enhancement of language proficiency for A1-B1 proficiency levels, coupled with a targeted cognitive approach to PVs at the A2-B1 levels, can result in enhanced, enduring retention of PV knowledge. This study deliberates on pragmatic implications for the efficacious advancement of EFL learners' comprehension and utilization of PVs.
... Scholars have defined phrasal verb variously. Darwin and Gray [7] define phrasal verb as a combination of "a verb + particle or a verb + preposition that functions as a single verb, both parts giving up meaning in order to form a new lexical item" (pp. 65). ...
... Although English phrasal verbs are commonly used because of their flexibility, practicability, adaptability, and efficiency [12], non-native speakers have difficulty in absorbing them due to permeability [5,7]. Additionally, phrasal verbs have a wide range of variability in syntax and semantics, which can challenge ESL/English as a foreign language learners [13]. ...
... Consequently, they seldom used phrasal verbs in their academic writing because phrasal verbs often have multiple meanings from literal meanings, which was hard for them to understand, and they only used simple language or single verbs in their academic writing. This finding is supported by scholars [5,7] who have asserted that non-native speakers have difficulty in absorbing phrasal verbs. This finding is aligned with that of the study conducted by Huynh and Vo [21] who have found that phrasal verbs were avoided by Vietnamese students in academic writing. ...
Phrasal verbs (PVs) are notably essential for English language learners due to their common use in spoken and informal written language; however, English as a foreign language (EFL) learners may find it difficult to master phrasal verbs, not only at receptive but also productive levels. The syntactic and semantic complexities prove much more troublesome in academic writing for those learners whose mother tongue does not feature phrasal verb formations. Therefore, this study aims at exploring English majors’ difficulties with phrasal verbs in terms of syntactic, semantic properties, and formality and informality of phrasal verbs in academic writing at a tertiary institution in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam. The participants of the study consisted of 124 English majors. The quantitative and qualitative research methods were applied to collect data via questionnaire and semi-structured interview. The SPSS software (20.0) was used to process the quantitative data collected from questionnaires, while the content analysis was applied to analyze the qualitative data collected from semi-structured interviews. The results revealed that research participants faced difficulties in academic writing most from the semantic property, followed by the formality and informality of phrasal verbs and the syntactic property. Such preliminary findings are hoped to contribute to a better understanding of English as a foreign language learners’ difficulties with phrasal verbs as well as to enhance the quality of academic teaching and learning.
... Some types of multi-word verbs, i.e. verb-particle combinations, are a feature of the Germanic language family to which English belongs (Darwin & Gray 1999;Dagut & Laufer 1985;cf. Celce-Murcia & Larsen-Freeman 1999: 425). ...
... look over one's shoulder), the forms of which are indistinguishable from one another at first glance. Various syntactic tests have heretofore been proposed to differentiate these two types of verbs by researchers (e.g., Bolinger 1971;Darwin & Gray 1999;Quirk et al. 1985;Claridge 2000). In this study Quirk et al.'s (1985Quirk et al.'s ( : 1167 syntactic tests will be applied in order to distinguish them: (a) The particle of a phrasal verb can stand either before or after the noun phrase following the verb, but that of the prepositional verb must (unless deferred) precede the noun phrase. ...
... The presentation of multi-word verbs in the materials is equally, if not more, important than their selection. Therefore, both writers of learning materials and teachers should systematically present these multi-word units to learners in order to avoid unnecessary confusion (see, for instance, Darwin and Gray (1999) for a systematic approach to phrasal verb classification). ...
In the context of foreign and second language learning, multi-word units constitute a particularly interesting phenomenon since they are known to cause problems for learners. One group of multi-word units that causes great difficulty even for advanced learners of English is multi-word verbs. Their acquisition and active usage is a challenge since they are complex both in terms of their grammatical form and their lexical meaning. This study provides a detailed, descriptive investigation of four different categories of multi-word verbs – namely phrasal, phrasal-prepositional, prepositional verbs and verb-noun collocations – in the essays written by intermediate to advanced level of Turkish learners of English. The Turkish sub-corpus (TICLE) of the International Corpus of Learner English (ICLE) has been the basis for the investigation. In order to thoroughly capture difficulties the learners experience in the use multi-word verbs and gain a better understanding of their phraseological competence, both the qualitative and quantitative aspects of the learners’ performance are investigated. An important aim of the study is to determine whether, and if so, to what extent, the learner’s first language (L1) influences their use of multi-word verbs in English. In addition to the learner’s L1, possible effects of other factors (both learner-related and external variables) are also investigated in the context of two categories of multi-word verbs, namely phrasal and phrasal-prepositional verbs – the two verb categories reported to be avoided and/or underused by many learner groups.
... This provides valuable insights for educators to shape instructional approaches and materials. In assessing the proficiency and perspectives of Emirati eighth graders towards phrasal verbs, the study resonates with the findings of Darwin and Gray (1999) and Kurtyka, (2013), who emphasized the significance of phrasal verbs in understanding their frequent use in everyday speech. The results showing high performance in high-frequency phrasal verbs align with the findings of Sanosi (2018), who highlighted the impact of phrasal verbs on vocabulary acquisition. ...
... A multi-faceted approach is essential to effectively teach phrasal verbs, incorporating contextualized learning, game-based instruction, exposure to authentic language, explicit instruction on verb patterns, and metaphorical meaning awareness. Embedding phrasal verbs in meaningful contexts through roleplaying and task-based learning enhances retention (Darwin & Gray, 1999). Interactive games like charades and digital quizzes, such as those on Quizlet and Kahoot, increase engagement and facilitate learning (Roohani & Vincheh, 2023). ...
Impact Statement
Achieving fluency and effective communication as an English as a Foreign Language (EFL) learner requires the mastery of phrasal verbs, which can be challenging to overcome. This study examines Emirati eighth-grade students’ knowledge and attitudes towards learning these phrasal verbs. Students seem to have a good grasp of frequent phrasal verbs used commonly but tend to have difficulty with less familiar ones. These results highlight deficiencies in the curriculum and pedagogical approaches. To fill these gaps, conceptual teaching, technology-aided instruction, innovation, and other teaching strategies are needed in modern-day education. Tutor and curriculum designer collaboration is essential in overcoming these obstacles to improve English instruction so that learners acquire the necessary academic and practical communication skills. This research has added to the understanding of the issues in acquiring a foreign language and can be used to aid other teachers who work with students whose first language is Arabic.
... A phrasal verb is a construction consisting of a verb and a particle (Dehe, 2002). This construction acts as one syntactic and semantic unit (Darwin & Gray, 1999;Quirk, Soran University | Twejer | Volume:7, Issue:1, 2024Greenbaum, Leech, & Svartvik, 1985. According to Cornell (1985), most phrasal verbs are nonidiomatic because their meaning may be inferred from the meaning of the proper verb. ...
... As previously mentioned, traditional methods on the semantics of phrasal verbs (e.g., Fraser, 1976) regarded them as non-compositional expressions and held that the particle does not influence their meaning. As a result, a few linguists and educators have critiqued the way that phrasal verbs are presented in textbooks (e.g., Cornell, 1985;Darwin & Gray, 1999;Gardner & Davies, 2007;Moon, 1997;Tyler & Evans, 2004;Strong & Boers, 2019). Exercises that include filling in the gaps are given after each lesson and phrasal verbs are listed in phrases with their definitions in parentheses. ...
This study aims to examine the effects of cognitive linguistic approaches on learning English idiomatic phrasal verbs among Kurdish EFL university students. The participants of this study were 62 sophomores in the English Department, at Soran University. They were enrolled in the course ‘Communication Skills’, the first semester of the academic year 2022-2023, and they were put into two distinct groups the control and the experiment groups, with 31 students in each group. Students in both groups received instruction from the same lecturer for thirteen weeks. The control and experiment groups were given instructional treatments based on traditional methods and cognitive linguistic approaches, respectively. A semi-structured interview and pre-and post-tests were used as the instruments of the study for data collection. The descriptive statistics of SPSS analysis, by paired samples t-tests, indicated that students in the experiment group outperformed those in the control group. Concerning (p < 0.05), the difference between both groups was statistically significant in favour of the experiment group (t = 2.186, p = .037). Besides, the difference between both groups related to exposed items was not statistically significant (t = 1.153, p = .258). Additionally, the difference between both groups related to unexposed items was statistically significant in favour of the experiment group (t = 2.934, p = .006). The interviewees’ statements supported the statistical data, and they considered cognitive-based lesson plans helpful and joyful.
... The present study is interested in the use of phrasal verbs at the phraseological level. A phrasal verb is usually defined as a structure that consists of a verb proper and a morphologically invariable particle that functions as a single unit both lexically and syntactically (Darwin and Gray 1999). The present study determines on phrasal verbs as the linguistic feature for several reasons. ...
... Given the chronological evolution of PV usage in English fiction, we may expect an order of PV use as Lovell (2010)>Lyell (1999)>Yang (1981)>Wang (1941, with Wang's translations having the lowest and Lovell's the highest frequency of PVs. And if the use of PVs increases steadily over time, we may expect a more remarkable difference between Wang and the other three translators, as there is forty years of time difference between Wang and the other three. ...
... The present study is interested in the use of phrasal verbs at the phraseological level. A phrasal verb is usually defined as a structure that consists of a verb proper and a morphologically invariable particle that functions as a single unit both lexically and syntactically (Darwin and Gray 1999). The present study determines on phrasal verbs as the linguistic feature for several reasons. ...
... Given the chronological evolution of PV usage in English fiction, we may expect an order of PV use as Lovell (2010)>Lyell (1999)>Yang (1981)>Wang (1941, with Wang's translations having the lowest and Lovell's the highest frequency of PVs. And if the use of PVs increases steadily over time, we may expect a more remarkable difference between Wang and the other three translators, as there is forty years of time difference between Wang and the other three. ...
The present study revisits the unique item hypothesis (UIH) from the perspective of translation directionality in the Chinese–English(C–E) language pair. Phrasal verb (PV) is used as the linguistic feature to investigate whether UIH holds true in C–E translations and whether translation directionality plays a role in the representation of unique items, based on a self-built parallel corpus of Lu Xun’s short stories and their English translations done by two L1 and two L2 translators, and a reference corpus of BNC short stories as the non-translated reference. It is found PVs are significantly over-represented in C–E translated texts when compared with English non-translated texts, and this overrepresentation is mainly attributed to the remarkable use of PVs by L1 translators; and there is a significant difference in the use of PVs by translators of different directionality, while no significant difference is found within the same direction. Additionally, L2 translators tend to use a limited range of PVs and prefer transparent PVs to semi-transparent and opaque ones. The results falsify the UIH in general and suggest that UIH is a conditional translation tendency constrained by translation directionality, or UIH is directionality-dependent. Gravitational pull model is used to analyze and explain the divergence between different translation directions.
... whether the head verb and the particle can be set apart from each other by an object). Indeed, it is this syntactic complexity of English phrasal verb structures that may have tempted Darwin and Gray (1999) to assert that "the phrasal verb is a syntactic oddity in the language world" (p. 65). ...
... This unfamiliarity is most salient within learners whose first languages are of non-Germanic origins. This is because phrasal verb constructions are characteristic of languages within the Germanic language family (Darwin & Gray, 1999;Laufer, 2000). Indeed, research examining EFL learners' phrasal verb usage suggests that learners are quite vulnerable to making errors when putting phrasal verbs into use particularly when phrasal verb structures do not exist in the learners' native language (Paquot & Granger, 2012). ...
Research on English phrasal verbs indicates that these lexical units are problematic and hence difficult to deal with by EFL learners. Thus, one common strategy learners use when encountering phrasal verbs is avoidance: i.e. simply to avoid decoding them in spoken or written content as well as avoid using them in their own speech or writing. This study examines whether contextual cues, i.e. written or spoken context surrounding phrasal verbs, could be of any help to EFL learners in dealing with such lexical units both in receptive and productive tasks. A total of 60 English majors at King Abdulaziz University sat at two separate testing sessions in which they were tested on their recognition as well as recall of 30 preselected unknown English phrasal verbs. Using a between-groups design, the subjects were randomly allocated to three intact groups based on the amount of phrasal verb contextual cues they were exposed to during the first testing session: no contextual cues (control group), sentential-level cues (treatment group 1), and paragraph-level cues (treatment group 2). A receptive multiple-choice test on the target phrasal verbs was conducted during the first session followed by a productive fill-in-the-blank cloze test on the second session. The results of one-way between-groups ANOVA indicate that the paragraph-level cues group outperformed both the no contextual cues group as well as the sentential-level cues one on the receptive measure. However, none of the three groups exhibited any significant differences in their performance on the productive measure. These findings emphasize the role of contextual cues in decoding English phrasal verbs in the receptive mode (i.e. during listening or reading tasks) but call for exploring alternative routes to contextual cues in aiding EFL learners’ use of these lexical units in the productive mode (i.e. during speech or writing tasks).
... An alternative approach to classification and definition of PV, is proposed by Darwin and Gray (1999) who reverse-engineered Bolinger (1971) testing process for the identification of PVs assuming that each verb plus particle combination is a PV until proven otherwise. They adopted the definition of PV as a combination of a verb proper and a morphologically invariable particle that function together as a single unit both lexically and syntactically (Quirk et al., 1985;Biber et al., 1999) and developed a number of tests to prove that a multi-word verb is not a PV (and not the other way around as it was in Bolinger, 1971). ...
... What is crucial of Darwin and Gray (1999) work is not only that they aimed at providing a more systematic classification of PVs but more importantly the motivation behind this goal. ...
Phrasal Verbs (PVs) constitute a peculiar and distinctive feature of the English language and represent a real challenge not only for non-native learners of English but also for computational models of language. The main difficulty in processing PVs, both cognitively and computationally, is connected to their complex semantics-they are often idiomatic and polysemous-which has led a long tradition of linguists to treat them as an unsystematic and unpredictable construction. Recent work in the domain of Cognitive Linguistics, has however provided an alternative and more systematic approach to PVs, explaining their non-compositional meanings in terms of the metaphorical extension of the particles' meanings. Given that the cognitive validity of this approach has been repeatedly validated by research on learners of English, the aim of this work is to test its computational suitability from the perspective of Distributional Semantics. We analyzed three different semantic spaces to test how PVs' and particles' meanings are represented and whether any of the three embeddings manage to capture the particles' weight in the semantics of the entire construction. Our findings showed that phrase-embeddings are more suitable to represent the meanings of the entire PV construction, while word embeddings are better to capture the meanings of particles. Finally the analysis on POS-tagged embeddings seems to give evidence in favour of the Cognitive Linguistics account. Since improving the semantic representation of PVs could be extremely useful for many NLP applications, further research is needed to validate or disconfirm the current findings.
... Phrasal verb (henceforth PV) is a type of formulaic sequence that "contains a verb proper and a morphologically invariable particle that functions lexically and syntactically as a unit" (Gardner & Davies, 2007;Garnier & Schmitt, 2016;Liao & Fukuya, 2004;Wood, 2010). In the field of second language (L2) acquisition, grammarians and applied linguists generally agree that phrasal verbs are an essential and advanced component of lexical knowledge in both spoken and written documents (Darwin & Gray, 1999;Gardner & Davies, 2007;Liu, 2011;Nation, 1990). Indeed, phrasal verbs are widespread and pervasive in ordinary English communication, are employed frequently by native speakers, and require fluency (Garnier & Schmitt, 2015). ...
... Learners of English as a Second Language (ESL) and English as a Foreign Language (EFL) frequently lack an understanding of the semantic properties of phrasal verbs and the ability to use them appropriately in communication. Teachers also avoid phrasal verbs because they are challenging to define and little research has been conducted on commonly used phrasal verbs (Darwin & Gray, 1999). Learners frequently grapple with the meaning of complex phrasal verbs because this meaning is unrelated to the usual meaning of the constituent words (Blau, Gonzales, & Green, 1983). ...
This study examined Thai senior high school EFL learners’ receptive and productive knowledge of English polysemous phrasal verbs. The research employed the framework developed by Garnier and Schmitt (2015), which is the most widely acknowledged and functional concept of English polysemous phrasal verb knowledge. A battery of tests measuring the participants’ receptive and productive knowledge of English polysemous phrasal verbs and vocabulary size were administered. The results indicated that Thai EFL high school learners had an intermediate understanding of polysemous English phrasal verbs. On the receptive knowledge test, participants scored higher than on the controlled and uncontrolled productive knowledge assessments. In addition, the results demonstrated a positive correlation between vocabulary size and receptive / productive knowledge of English polysemous phrasal verbs. The correlation analysis also revealed that a number of English polysemous phrasal verb knowledge dimensions were interrelated. This study provides empirical evidence that Thai EFL learners’ knowledge of English polysemous phrasal verbs develops along a continuum from receptive to productive use. This research also suggests that polysemous phrasal verbs are multidimensional and progressive. Longitudinal experiments with varying L1 and education levels would be beneficial for future research.
... A turning point may have been when Darwin and Gray (1999) critiqued how the literature was defining PVs and suggested a procedure for identifying PVs through a series of grammatical tests. Radically, they called for researchers and teachers to "consider all verb + particle 1 combinations to be potential phrasal verbs until they can be proven otherwise (p. ...
... Darwin and Gray (1999) use the word particle here to mean either a particle or a preposition which has yet to be identified. ...
This study investigated the usage of high-frequency English phrasal verbs (PVs) and the effects of L1 typology for learners of English as a Foreign Language (EFL). Essays by native English speakers and by Chinese and Japanese EFL learners from the International Corpus Network of Asian Learners (ICNALE) were analyzed to determine directional, aspectual, and idiomatic PV usage. As English, Chinese, and Japanese are typologically different languages, comparing their PV usage revealed preferences for how the three groups expressed motion, as seen in directional PVs, and change of state events, which are often seen in idiomatic and aspectual PVs. A Chi-squared test revealed a significant association between L1 typology and PV types, and a pairwise comparison indicated a disproportionate use of PVs among the groups. For example, the two EFL learner groups used fewer directional PVs than the English native speakers. Accordingly, L1 typology appears to be a factor in influencing the types of PVs that are used. Considering the high frequency of the PVs investigated in the current study, there are important pedagogical implications for educators who are recommended to take into consideration their learners’ L1 and how it can affect their ability to acquire and use PVs of varying types.
... A particle such as "up" focuses on the actions produced, as in "break up." Native speakers can also use verb-particle pairing, although L2 speakers may not fully understand how such a pairing works, and this pairing taxes learners' understanding (Darwin & Gray, 1999;Laufer & Eliasson, 1993;Liao & Fukuya, 2004). Additionally, their semantic complexity specific to the context creates a unique syntax (Alangari et al., 2020). ...
... Liao and Fukuya (2004) demonstrated that Chinese learners did not use literal PVs due to semantic difficulty. Darwin and Gray (1999) showed that L2 English learners found using PVs difficult and struggled to apply the verb and particle meaning as a single term. Brinton (1988) considered "drink up" and other similar terms as PVs, although Quirk and Greenbaum (1973) ...
This study investigates the usefulness of acquiring English PVs (as a key component of English vocabulary) using listening activities. Therefore, this study analyzes how Arabic speakers studying English as a foreign language (EFL) understand and use English phrasal verbs through listening. A self-administered survey was distributed to 74 students, mainly from Saudi Arabia. They listened to a recording incorporating frequently used English phrasal verbs and identified those they could recognize. The survey also measured the ability of respondents to provide sentences in which they used phrasal verbs and gave their meanings in Arabic. The findings indicated that EFL students are likely more familiar with phrasal verbs in writing than in an oral context. For instance, the average respondent could detect six or seven out of ten phrasal verbs they heard, while about 90% of respondents could use the provided phrasal verbs correctly in writing. Respondents recognized some phrasal verbs more than others. At least 80% recognized “pick me up,” “go on,” and “go out,” while less than 47% recognized “came out” and “set up.” More than 81% knew the correct definition of phrasal verbs. These findings offer foundational data to help improve methodologies for Arabic speakers learning EFL through listening activities.
... Phrasal verbs (PVs) are verb particle combinations syntacally (Cappelle et al., 2010;Richards and Schmidt, 2011). Semantically, PVs have been viewed as lexical units along a continuum (Dagut and Laufer, 1985;Darwin and Gray, 1999;Dixon, 1982;Palmer, 1974) with PVs like "walk in" (whose meaning is transparent) and "give up" (which has an opaque figurative sense only) at the two ends of this continuum. In terms of Cappelle et al. (2010), the PVs at the two opposite ends are literal and figurative PVs. ...
This paper addresses an important psycholinguistic question: whether L2 learners preferentially process phrasal verbs (PVs) literally or figuratively, irrespective of context and proficiency levels. Our primary aim was twofold: first, to investigate how familiar English L2 PVs are processed—whether literally or figuratively—and secondly, to explore this across different contexts (neutral, literal bias, figurative bias) and proficiency levels among learners. Drawing on existing literature, we tentatively hypothesized that while learners might activate literal meanings early in processing, figurative activation could dominate later stages as far as familiar PVs are concerned. Familiarity with PVs may be critical across proficiency levels in driving PV processing. What’s more, the preferred meaning may be bootstrapped in supporting context, but the less preferred meaning is likely suppressed even with context boost. To achieve these objectives, an eye-tracking experiment was conducted with intermediate and advanced Chinese English L2 learners. Participants read context sentences containing PVs followed by a visual word search task to assess PV meaning activation at early, late and further delayed stages. Statistic analysis revealed that no consistent interpretation of PVs as literal or figurative in the time course emerged. However, in sentence reading, we observed faster late meaning activation in both literal and figurative contexts than in the neutral context, and delayed preference for figurative interpretation in the post-PV region. Meanwhile, in visual word search task, meaning activation was context-dependent and fluctuated over time, indicating temporal dynamics in processing. Last but not least, proficiency ranging from intermediate to advanced levels did not significantly impact processing when PV familiarity was achieved. Our findings suggest that teaching strategies should focus on enhancing learners’ ability to recognize figurative meanings. This approach could improve reading comprehension by promoting learner awareness of PVs as whole lexical units. In conclusion, this study enhances our understanding the mechanisms underlying L2 PV processing dynamics and provides actionable insights for language acquisition strategies, thus contributing valuable knowledge to the field of second language processing and learning.
... Furthermore, Students find PVs difficult to understand and avoid them because of the unpredictable verb and particle combination as well as the phrasal verbs' complex syntactical and semantical arrangements [7,27,28]. FL students' difficulties with PVs, whether syntactical, semantical, or combinations, are improved by the extremely creative setting of English PVs [29,30]. ...
The present paper aims to investigate and examine the semantic features of phrasal verbs at the EFL level. The main objectives of conducting this study are to recognize some semantic features associated with language acquisition and to review the semantic structures of these phrasal verbs. Because of their intricate semantic patterns, which include polysemy and idiomatic usage, phrasal verbs (PVs) pose a substantial barrier to students learning English as a foreign language (EFL) as well as second language (L2) learners. The importance of phrasal verbs in the English language, as well as the difficulties learners encounter in mastering them, are examined in the present paper. PVs are quite common in both spoken and written English, according to the statistical investigation of corpus data, such as the British National Corpus (BNC), underscoring their crucial role in developing fluency. Despite being widely used, PVs can be difficult because of their polysemous character and erratic verb-particle combinations. The understanding of polysemy in L2 learners has not received enough attention in the literature, which has concentrated on receptive and productive knowledge regarding PVs. This study looks at the semantic characteristics of PVs, classifying them as literal, semi-transparent, and idiomatic. It also highlights the necessity of specialized teaching strategies to assist students in navigating these complications. The study concludes that in order to enhance both comprehension and production in EFL situations, language teaching must pay close attention to PVs' complex syntactic and semantic characteristics. Achieving native-like fluency and competency in English, especially in casual speech, requires effective mastery of PVs. Finally, this paper proposes that as lexical items, phrasal verbs are certainly one of the greatest problematic tasks in education. This paper additionally offers the related past studies on this subject and presents the outcomes of these studies.
... [6]. Схожу дефініцію надають дослідники К. Дарвін та Л. Грей, які описують ФД як «поєднання «дієслово + частка», яке функціонує як одне дієслово, обидві частини якого втрачають значення, щоб утворити нову лексичну одиницю» [8]. Наприклад get along with -be on friendly terms; hold back -1) control (tears, laughter), 2) hesitate; keep out -exclude sb/sth. ...
... However, it can also be regarded as a combination of verb plus particle that functions as an individual verb, both parts giving up meaning in order to arrange new lexical item. (Darwin and Gray, 1999). (2008) proposed the following four items: ...
My deceased father whose pure love and unselfish support over years laid the foundation for me to follow my dreams and achieve my goals.
... According to some researchers, the use of phrasal verbs demonstrates the difference between formal and informal English (Alangari et al., 2020). A phrasal verb is a verb followed by a particle or a combination of a particle and a preposition, the meaning of which is different from the meaning of its separate parts; for example, 'get up' or 'get out of' (Darwin & Gray, 1999;Koprowski, 2005;Lewis, 1993). In other words, the meaning of the combination cannot be predicted from the meaning of verb and particle in isolation (Trask, 1993). ...
The use of applications in language learning to enhance students' performance is worth exploring for its pedagogical implications. Socrative is becoming popular in second-language acquisition. Consequently, this study investigated the use of Socrative as an educational tool for learning phrasal verbs. 33 EFL students at three different levels of English (B2, C1, and C2) participated in the research, which involved reading short texts and doing vocabulary exercises on Google forms, prior to competing in quizzes on Socrative. The study aimed to examine the students' perceptions of learning phrasal verbs via quizzes and the effectiveness of Socrative for this purpose. The findings indicate that their general overview was positive, and that competing both against themselves and their peers played a significant role in their learning experience. Socrative, a user-friendly application easily accessible on any portable device, and which provides instant feedback, can be deemed a convenient tool to create an environment that can motivate and engage students in their learning context.
... They represent a composite family with many dimensions and show variability across several factors (e.g., Moon, 1998). 3. Proverbs are formulaic expressions, fixed and compositional, conveying popular wisdom [A rolling stone gathers no moss] (e.g., Mieder and Dundes, 1994) 4. Binomials are compositional sequences of two words linked by "and" which have a fixed order [bride and groom], which typically behave as a larger noun phrase (NP) (e.g., Benor and Levy, 2006) 5. Discourse organizers are meta-linguistic devices that serve as directional guides to signal how listeners should interpret the incoming information [on the other hand] (e.g., Tyler, 1994) 6. Phrasal verbs are verb þ particle combinations [bring about] that function as a single verb, both parts contributing meaning in order to form a new lexical item (e.g., Darwin and Gray, 1999) 7. Conversational routines are co-occurring phrases which have a discourse function that differs from the literal referential meaning, very often having a specific pragmatic function [let's face it] (e.g., Aijmer, 2014) 8. Complex prepositions are sequences of words with specific grammatical functions [in spite of] (e.g., Quirk and Mulholland, 1964) The predictive brain predicting language ...
... In this approach "plain memorisation is what is expected from learners rather than any kind of semantic analysis" (White 2012: 420). For this reason, some linguists, such as Darwin and Gray (1999), and Gardner and Davis (2007) have criticised this form of introducing phrasal verbs in coursebooks by means of providing lists of multi-word verbs based on the same core verb. ...
Phrasal verbs are a vital, nonetheless challenging to teach and learn, part of the English language. Even though phrasal verbs are frequently used by native speakers, for learners of English they pose a considerable challenge as far as their acquisition and use are concerned. For this reason, these multi-word verbs are also demanding for English teachers in terms of teaching them effectively. The general aim of this study is to examine English teachers’ approach to phrasal verbs taught at the B2 level in upper-secondary schools. The paper presents an excerpt of a survey conducted among secondary school English teachers. It examined their attitude to phrasal verbs, their opinions of phrasal verb tasks used in the coursebooks and it analysed the methods which should be used in order to introduce and practise these demanding multi-word verbs well.
... 33). This detachment has been the cause of much debate about the inner workings of PVs (Darwin & Gray 1999;Gardner & Davies, 2007) and is how PVs have come to exhibit complex forms such as a transitive and intransitive PVs of varying separability and compositionality. While the knowledge of these forms would allow learners to use PVs more confidently in a variety of ways, those involved with teaching English as a foreign language will know that MWEs can also be used and acquired with only superficial knowledge. ...
This study investigated the knowledge of English phrasal verbs (PVs) among Japanese university students. PVs have been described by learners as ambiguous and difficult, often resulting in their avoidance, and much of the literature has focused on how they can be taught effectively. However, it is relatively unknown as to what knowledge learners typically develop on their own without undergoing classroom interventions that focus specifically on PVs. To investigate this issue, a survey on PVs was distributed to eight different departments at universities across Japan resulting in 221 participants, with six students participating in follow‐up interviews. The data from the PV survey provided qualitative data for analysis, the interviews were transcribed, and axial coding was utilized to formulate a holistic examination of the participants’ knowledge of PVs. The results revealed that the participants had an awareness of PVs but had acquired most of them as chunks of language without much knowledge of their individual parts, which was found to lower their confidence and increase their perceived difficulty. Additionally, directional PVs, particularly with go and come, were the easiest for the participants due to L1–L2 similarities. However, their understanding of idiomatic and aspectual PVs appeared to be superficial and lacking.
... As a result, numerous scholarly articles have been written to discuss the semantic and syntactic complexities of PVs (Dehé, 2002;Jackendoff, 2002). Despite this, their presentation in textbooks often emphasizes their arbitrary nature, suggesting an unsystematic way of teaching them (Cornell, 1985;Darwin & Gray, 1999;Gardner & Davies, 2007;Moon, 1997). ...
Phrasal verbs (PVs) are a challenging aspect of English language learning, particularly for English as a Foreign Language (EFL) learners. The current study investigated whether a data-driven learning (DDL) approach could reduce PV-related errors (PVEs) in writing tasks for intermediate EFL learners. In doing so, it employed an experimental design with 30 female EFL learners aged 13 to 20 randomly assigned to an experimental group (n=15) and a control group (n=15). The Nelson Proficiency Test ensured that both groups had similar proficiency levels. The pre-test and the post-test required the participants to write six paragraphs using six separate sets of five related PVs. Each group received six 90-minute instruction sessions, where the Wikipedia Corpus was used to teach PVs to the experimental group with a DDL approach, and explicit instruction, focusing on memorizing and retaining the meanings of each PV, was used for teaching the same to the control group. The study's findings indicated that the experimental group outperformed the control group in reducing PVEs, demonstrating the effectiveness of the DDL method. Therefore, the study recommends using DDL as a tool for teaching and learning PVs in EFL classrooms, as it promotes learners' ability to use PVs accurately and appropriately.
... Phrasal verbs are typically defined as a verb and particle combination, such as "go away" or "come down" (Darwin & Gray, 1999). However, phrasal verbs are also notably difficult to define as many theories have attempted to analyze their semantic or syntactic features to further divide them into sub-categories such as prepositional verbs and free combinations (e.g., Biber et al., 1999;Liu, 2011). ...
In EFL teaching and research, multiword vocabulary (i.e., phrasal verbs and idiomatic expressions) is often given little attention. In Japan, emphasis is placed on learning single-word units in EFL education in order to pass entrance examinations (Yoshitomi et al., 2006). However, the lack of focus on multiword units may have consequences on learnersʼ ability to comprehend or produce natural English (e.g., Liao & Fukuya, 2004; Yasuda, 2010). Given the potential value of multiword vocabulary learning, the purpose of this study is to determine if there is such a general correlation between general English proficiency, as measured by standardized tests, and the ability to interpret phrasal verbs and idiomatic expressions. We conducted a meta-analysis of scores from multiword vocabulary tests taken by students at three different universities that include five different groups (N = 366, 688, 33, 40, and 30) and their scores on three different standardized English tests (i.e., TOEFL ITP ® , TOEIC ® , and Pearsonʼs Benchmark). Using a random effects meta-analysis, we found a mean effect of 0.488, indicating that there is a medium-sized general trend for students who achieved higher scores on a multiword test to also score higher on standardized tests.
... The term phrasal verb is generally illustrated as a verb plus particle combination or a lexical verb that has three separate parts (Darwin & Gray, 1999). There are two word classes of phrasal verbs; the first class is verb which is divided into three major categories, according to their function within the verb phrase, that are full verbs, primary verbs, and auxiliary verbs (Rizka et al., 2018). ...
This study aimed to explore the existence of syntactic problems and semantic problems and to explain the relation of syntactic problems to semantic problems among Libyan students in using phrasal verbs during writing English texts. The participants in this study were ten Libyan students studying in three Universities in Semarang, Central Java, Indonesia. The ten participants were from different majors of Master and Doctoral degrees. They can use English language in their study so they have a basic knowledge of English. The data were ten English which taken by Libyan students as previous papers. In this study, the researcher used a descriptive qualitative method to analyze the data. The results showed that Libyan students have three problems related to adverb insertion, particle placement and fronting particle and they have semantic problems in understanding the meanings in the semantic classes of phrasal verbs and semantic (non-)compositionality. Finally, the researcher found out that the syntactic behaviour of particles depends on semantic (non-)compositionality.
... Types of Phrasal Units: [28]categorization of PVs might be an intricate issue, as [29], p. 6 states "being or not being a phrasal verb is a matter of degree". So, do not use a vague grouping process, scholars must agree upon a description, thus necessitating them to start from a comparable point. ...
This paper reviews the status of learning and teaching English Phrasal verbs in the Arab word and especially in the Jordanian context. However, in this process of learning English Phrasal verbs, Jordanian EFL university students in the attempt to master this lexical unit face different difficulties. Through the related literature of the studies conducted on these difficulties it was suggested that the majority of errors made by the Jordanian EFL students are the results of frequent acquisition and learning process, such as structural differences between L1 and L2, passive learning interpretation, and poor language engagement. Additional research is needed to look at other issues, such as the influence of direct teaching, learners' awareness of the usage of phrasal verbs in everyday English, and the educational environment. Moreover, the researcher speculates that the differences between first and second languages and the syntactic-semantic difficulty of phrasal verbs may be reasons for the Jordanian EFL students' phrasal verbs avoidance up to a specific level of use and practice in the EFL setting.
... Phrasal verbs (henceforth: PVs) are defined in this paper as a verb + particle combination in which both elements give up meaning to form one new lexical element (e.g. give up) (Darwin & Gray 1999). Second Language Acquisition (SLA) research has pointed out the difficulty PVs pose for L2 learners. ...
Research has shown that English as a second language (ESL) learners find phrasal verbs (PVs) hard to acquire and often avoid these constructions. An often-neglected aspect in avoidance literature is the uncertainty of knowing the correct verb + particle pairing. The present paper investigated this by looking at Dutch ESL learners' knowledge of verb + particle pairings as well as the influence of the L1 on L2 lexical development. To this end, over 50 Dutch learners of English at two proficiency levels were tested and compared to native speakers on English PVs that either (mis)match in form and meaning as compared to the Dutch counterpart. Results indicate that learners make more mistakes when the L1 and L2 differ in form and meaning. L1 interference is observed as learners overextend Dutch versions into English. This interference need not fossilise as advanced learners perform more like native speakers. Directions for future inquiries are provided as well.
... The importance of PVs and multi-word expressions in English SLA rises due to the high frequency in English (Darwin & Gray, 1999). It has been suggested that the L2 competency grows if a learner has stronger competence over the PVs which might help him achieve the target goals in the L2 acquisition (Garnier & Schmitt, 2015). ...
The current study aims at exploring the usage of the Phrasal Verbs in the lower secondary Bangladeshi ELT textbooks which are prescribed by the Government of Bangladesh at national education levels. The methodological approach continues in this study based on the corpus tools and related analysis on the topic of Phrasal Verbs usage in those textbooks. The phrasal verbs that are found in the textbooks are extracted from the textbooks; their frequency distributions are analyzed, and finally checked with the two most authentic corpus of the English Language-The British National Corpus (BNC) and Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA). Alongside, deriving the top fifteen Phrasal Verbs in the textbook corpus with their significant values; the relative positions to the two reference corpora and other corpus-related scores of the phrasal verbs are compared, with reference to the study of Liu (2011), which are also included in the advanced research of PHaVE List (2015). The results find that the Phrasal Verbs used in the selected textbooks are quite irrelevant to the two standard big corpora. Especially the corpus scores vary greatly when compared with the reference corpora. Finally, based on the findings some remarks and implications are prescribed for pedagogical purposes. The current study would be the first one that examines the Bangladeshi Lower Secondary ELT textbooks assisted by the corpus approach.
... The students' task is to learn all the given phrasal verbs by heart. However, some linguists, such as Darwin and Gray (1999) and Gardner and Davis (2007), have criticized book presentations of phrasal verbs in which lists of phrasal verbs are usually followed by matching or gap-filling exercises. What White (2012: 420) has underlined is that "plain memorisation is what is expected of learners rather than any kind of semantic analysis". ...
Phrasal verbs are an essential, though difficult to teach and learn, part of the English language. Although phrasal verbs are commonly used by native speakers, for English learners they pose a considerable challenge as far as their acquisition and use are concerned. The aim of this study is to examine students’ attitude towards phrasal verbs taught at the B2 level in upper-secondary schools, and to analyse the significance of these multi-word verbs. The paper presents an excerpt of a survey conducted among secondary school students, which examined their understanding of phrasal verbs and analysed students’ opinions about the importance of acquiring these demanding multi-word verbs.
... A phrasal verb is a verb followed by a particle or a combination of a particle and a preposition, the meaning of which is different from the meaning of its separate parts; for example, 'get up' or 'get out of' (Koprowski, 2005;Lewis, 1993;Darwin & Gray, 1999). In other words, the meaning of the combination cannot be predicted from the meaning of verb and particle in isolation (Trask, 1993). ...
Learning phrasal verbs, an essential part of the English language, can be a challenge for EFL students, since they find it difficult to remember the large number of these lexical items that are used in both spoken and written forms of the language. However, with the aid of technological applications, for example, Socrative, learning phrasal verbs can be more entertaining and dynamic. This paper reports on a study which involved 33 EFL students of three different levels of English (B2, C1 and C2 on the CEFR scale), who did reading and vocabulary exercises on Google forms prior to participating in competitive quizzes on Socrative. The aim of the study was to explore how the use of a Student Response System via quizzes on Socrative can arouse students' interest in learning phrasal verbs. The research examined the students' perceptions of their learning experience and to what extent they were motivated to acquire this lexicon via quizzes. The findings indicate that the general overview of the students' novel approach to learning in this way was positive, and that competing both against themselves and their peers played a significant role in their learning experience. Easily accessible on any portable device, Socrative can be seen as a reliable educational tool to enhance language learning.
... Quirk, Greenbaum, Leech, and Svartvik (1985) defined phrasal verbs on two primary dimensions: syntactic and lexical. The syntactic dimension views a phrasal verb as a single grammatical item, and it reports that a phrasal verb consists of "a verb followed by a morphologically invariable particle" (cited in Darwin & Gray, 1999). On the lexical basis, the meaning of a phrasal verb is less transparent, because its meaning can be rarely predicted from the meaning of its parts. ...
http://journal.asiatefl.org/main/main.php?inx_journals=21&inx_contents=216&main=1&sub=2&submode=3&PageMode=JournalView&s_title=Phrasal_Verbs_and_Breadth_of_Vocabulary_Knowledge_in_Second_Language_Reading_An_Exploratory_Study
... Phrasal verbs as an aspect of the lexicon are one of the most distinctive and productive structures among multi-word units. They are typical of spoken and informal English, but also widely used in all registers -from comic books to the most academic forms of the language (Biber et al., 1999;Darwin and Gray, 1999). When it comes down to non-native learners of English, particularly learners with non-Germanic first languages, phrasal verbs are considered notoriously difficult to learn due to their syntactic and semantic complexity. ...
Phrasal verbs, though very common in the English language, are acknowledged as difficult to acquire by non-native learners of English. The present study examines this issue focusing on two learner groups from different mother tongue backgrounds, i.e. Lithuanian and Polish advanced students of English. The analysis is conducted based on Granger's (1996) Contrastive Interlanguage Analysis methodology, investigating the Lithuanian and Polish components of the International Corpus of Learner English, as well as the Louvain Corpus of Native English Essays. The results obtained in the study prove that both learner groups underuse phrasal verbs compared with native English speakers. It is concluded that this could be due to the learners' limited repertoire of phrasal verbs as they employ significantly fewer phrasal verb types than native speakers. Furthermore, it is noticed that learners face similar stylistic, semantic and syntactic difficulties in the use of this language feature. In particular, the analysis shows that such errors might be caused by native language interference, as well as the inherent complexity of phrasal verbs. The present study not only helps to account for the challenges that are common to those language groups which lack phrasal verbs in their linguistic repository, but also provides insights into the understanding of advanced learner language.
The present paper delves into the distribution and uses of English phrasal verbs as well as their syntactic and semantic representation in the grade-1 ESL textbook published by the National Council of Educational Research and Training (NCERT) of India prescribed for the academic curriculum programme. The identified phrasal verbs are then compared with the list of 150 most frequent phrasal verbs in the British National Corpus (BNC) and The Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA) (Liu, 2011) and the constituent elements of EPVs (i.e. a verb and a particle) are also compared with the list of top 20 most frequent lexical verb lemmas and 16 most frequent particles functioning as phrasal verb forms in the British National Corpus (BNC) (Gardner & Davies, 2007) respectively. The study found that the particles denote their literal senses and contribute to the formation of compositional or literal meanings. This study does not reflect the most frequent phrasal verbs found in the various genres of the BNC and COCA. Lexical verbs are mostly verbs of motion, and particles belonging to the group of spatial orientation are presented in the grade-1- ESL textbook. Most of the phrasal verbs are presented in its literal sense. Very few present idiomatic/figurative/ extended meanings. However, the aspectual phrasal verbs are absent in the grade-1 ESL textbook.
This study investigates the cognitive processing of verb-particle constructions (VPCs) using eye-tracking data analysis method to explore how English native speakers process different types of the sequence NP-verb-particle-NP during reading tasks. While previous research has focused on phrasal verbs, our study extends this examination to include patterns with prepositions, aiming to identify distinct cognitive engagement patterns and processing efficiencies associated with each. We employed the Provo Corpus to analyse eye movements while participants read sentences containing these constructions. we focused on metrics such as first fixation duration, gaze duration, go-past times, and total reading times. Our findings indicate similarities in the lexical verbs, and significant differences in particles, indicating how these two types of constructions are processed, with phrasal verbs sometimes processed more efficiently than the prepositional counterparts. This suggests that phrasal verbs might be more deeply entrenched in the linguistic repertoire of native speakers, possibly functioning as single lexical units. This research contributes to the understanding of complex structures processing and the cognitive mechanisms that support it, offering insights that could influence linguistic theory and language education.
Research examining teachers’ cognition of lexical items has flourished in the past few years. However, most of these studies focused on individual words rather than formulaic sequences. The present study aims to fill this gap through eliciting teachers’ evaluation of one type of formulaic sequences: phrasal verbs (PVs). The aim is to examine factors (frequency, opacity, and learners’ receptive and productive knowledge) that might predict teachers’ evaluation of the difficulty and usefulness of 100 PV senses. For that purpose, a survey was administered to 174 teachers. Results of generalized mixed-effects modelling showed that teachers’ assessment of both the usefulness and difficulty of PVs was predicted by sense-specific corpus frequency and receptive knowledge of these PV senses. Moreover, difficulty ratings were additionally affected by opacity and productive knowledge of PVs. We discuss these findings in relation to previous research on L2 PV knowledge and implications for L2 teaching practice.
Aims
We investigated the extent to which child heritage speakers of English in contact with Spanish in Mexico accurately produce phrasal verbs, and if not, whether their difficulties are modulated by chronological age, language dominance, and experience.
Methods
We implemented an elicited production task to elicit the use of idiomatic and transparent phrasal verbs in school-age children using a cross-sectional design. We tested 26 English-heritage children and adolescents (7.5–17.3; M = 10.4) residing in Mexico. Their results were compared with those of 18 English monolingual children born and raised in the American Midwest (6.11–14.9, M = 10.2). Chronological age, dominance, and patterns of language experience were included as covariables.
Data and Analysis
Data were analyzed using generalized linear mixed models with binomial distribution.
Findings
The heritage children exhibited significant difficulties in accurately using phrasal verbs compared with monolingual children, particularly with idiomatic phrases, revealing an asymmetry between the two structure types. Difficulties were modulated by age and linguistic experience. Importantly, as children aged and experienced extended exposure to English, the observed challenges diminished, aligning with recent findings in heritage language development. We posit that these divergences are attributed to protracted development during childhood.
Originality
This study expands on recent work with adult heritage speakers of English by tracking the development of phrasal verbs in school-age children quasi-longitudinally rather than observing the adult-like outcome. Furthermore, examining young and older school-age heritage speakers of English in contact with Spanish as the dominant language in Mexico contributes to existing research primarily centered on heritage speakers of minoritized languages in the United States.
The aim of this study is to investigate the multi-word verbs, which are very common in English, but are acknowledged as difficult to acquire by non- native learners of English. Phrasal verbs and prepositional verbs serve an idiomatic purpose. Therefore, they should not be taken literally; rather, they have a figurative or metaphorical meaning. The existence of a simple notional verb in a synonymic relationship with a verb with an adverbial particle determines the non-native English speakers to avoid the latter. From the perspective of the Romanian language, where such constructions do not exist, it is obvious that the attempt to avoid verbs with an adverbial particle and the preference for simple verbs will be more significant as the semantic transparency of the English verbal construction is reduced.
This article explores the effectiveness of integrating the High-Intensity Interval Training (HIIT) method into English as a Foreign Language (EFL) classes for teaching phrasal verbs. The study investigates the impact of the HIIT approach on students' acquisition and usage of phrasal verbs, employing a mixedmethods research design. The findings indicate that the HIIT method enhances phrasal verb learning, leading to improved understanding, retention, and application of these challenging language components. The article concludes with implications for EFL educators seeking innovative approaches to enhance phrasal verb instruction.
In recent years, there has been considerable interest in how to maximize learners' retention of multiword expressions. One technique that has been shown to be highly effective is the use of exercises such as those found in mainstream English as a second language textbooks. In the present study, we investigated how the execution of a gap‐fill exercise impacts the learning of phrasal verbs with 118 learners studying English as a foreign language. Participants completed a gap‐fill exercise by referring to the answer key, or they received the answer key only after completing the exercise. The effects of the learning conditions were assessed with tests for measuring productive and receptive knowledge at two retention intervals. The results from mixed‐effects logistic regression modeling showed that both executions of the gap‐fill exercise led to similar rates of retention. The findings largely challenge previous research. We also explored how to minimize proactive interference when participants make errors in gap‐fill exercises by asking them to recollect their initial guesses during the posttests. The results showed that when the initial guess was produced, correct recall of the target phrasal verbs was much greater than when the guess was not recollected. The finding indicates that memory for the initial guess may play a vital role in how participants learn from their errors. The pedagogical implications of the findings are discussed, and future areas of research are proposed.
Spaced Repetition have been used as a strategy in teaching phrasal verbs for secondary school students. It helps the students of all ages to remember what they have studied in classroom. This strategy helps the students to keep their memory active all the time and make them save a big amount of information in order to use it when they need. This strategy can be considered as a revision to what they learn before. The present study aims to find out the effect of using spaced repetition strategy (hence for: SRS) on teaching phrasal verbs for Iraqi secondary school students and they can get benefits from this strategy by: 1. Finding out whether there is any significant difference between the students' achievement of the experimental group and that of the control group in English phrasal verbs in the posttest. 2. Finding out whether there is any significant difference between the students' achievement at the recognition level and that of the production level of the posttest. A sample of (60) female students were chosen randomly from the second stage of secondary school at Dar Al-Salam School for Girls in Al-Dhuluiya district in Salah Al-Din Governorate during the first semester of the academic year (2021-2022), from which (60) female students were selected, and they were divided into two equal groups according to Both groups were equalized in terms of their age, educational attainment of the parents, and their score in the English language subject in the previous grade of the academic year (2020-2021).
Although it is widely acknowledged that phrasal verbs constitute a major difficulty for language learners, only a few studies have examined how to best learn phrasal verbs in the EFL context. With the aim of addressing this gap in the literature, the current study compared the influence of different learning conditions on phrasal verb knowledge development. The 77 EFL participants were divided into two experimental groups (incidental learning vs. enhanced exposure) and a control group. While the incidental learning group read the target phrasal verbs within restaurant reviews, the enhanced exposure group had the phrasal verbs bolded and underlined in the same texts and the control group did not receive any treatment. The participants’ performance on the post-test revealed a clear advantage for enhanced exposure over incidental learning. The results also revealed a significant relationship between the participants’ prior vocabulary knowledge and their phrasal verb knowledge, and that opacity and vocabulary knowledge modulated learning gains. The results are discussed in light of the existing literature. Pedagogical implications and directions for future research are highlighted.
This study aims at exploring whether translating the source text (ST) and target text (TT) of different scripts will involve more cognitive effort than when the translator’s language pair scripts are similar. Another aim of this study is to investigate whether the difference in text direction between the language pair is another trigger of more cognitive effort in translation. Showing that languages of different scripts and text directions impose an added challenge to translators of these language pairs can justify attempts to finding special strategies and techniques of translation for such language pairs. This will, in turn, open the room for researching and introducing pedagogical approaches to translator training that might align with our findings.
To increase the ecological validity of TPR, we have implemented a new interface that integrates keystroke and eye-tracking data collected by the widely used computer-assisted translation (CAT) tool, SDL Trados Studio. The data collected in Trados is synchronized with the eye tracker data and converted into the data format used by the CRITT TPR-DB.
ARTICLE INFO ABSTRACT The study aims to investigate the challenges hindering an understanding of IPVs in EFL university context. The subjects were 42 male and female Sudanese English language major university students at the Department of English Language in Al-Butana University. A questionnaire and achievement test were employed as instruments for data collection. The results showed that students face many challenges in understanding IPVs as follows: practically, there is no intended focus of the area of IPVs as an important part of language, general overuse of single word verbs instead of multi word verbs and adopting not more appropriate contexts in for practicing IPVs. Moreover, the findings revealed that teaching and learning contexts are not varied accordingly. Based on these findings, the study recommends that IPVs are important area of language that should increase focus on this area by as follows: creating more appropriate contexts and situations for the most common IPVs, increasing chances for practicing IPVs in different contexts, adapting teaching and learning techniques accordingly and making use of common IPVs parallel to single word verbs in the classroom interaction.
Countless research studies have been carried out covering a wide range of aspects associated with phrasal verbs. However, little has been done when it comes to phrasal verbs in the mechanical engineering discourse, more so in the ESP teaching in the B/C/S context. This paper was aimed at investigating the role of phrasal verbs in the technical discourse, identifying the most frequent phrasal verbs within the mechanical engineering register, and determining the level of familiarity with such structures among the students at the Faculty of Mechanical Engineering in Zenica.
It is seemed to easy to understand what is a collocation, what is compound words, and what is an idiom for us. But there are various difficulties throughout for using them. We can obtain to differentiate them only studying, analyzing, and realizing. We know that it is covered up the words and word combinations of our lives. These are helped once more natural and sensible our worlds. Using properly collocations and compounds will also help you to increase your range of English vocabulary
While phrasal verbs (PVs) represent “a problematic feature of English vocabulary” ( Garnier & Schmitt, 2016 , p. 29) for a large number of learners, research into L2 English PVs remains insufficient. This study examines 150 tertiary-level L2 English learners’ knowledge of figurative meaning senses of PVs and the influence of congruence in the figurative meaning senses between L1 and L2 on their knowledge of the meaning senses. The research instruments consisted of a form-recall and a meaning-recall task, questionnaires, and focus group interviews. The results indicate that the learners’ PV knowledge differed significantly according to proficiency level and task type – production and reception. Further, L1 congruence influenced the learners’ knowledge of PVs differently depending on proficiency levels.
Although it is widely acknowledged that phrasal verbs constitute a major difficulty for language learners, only a few studies have examined how to best learn phrasal verbs in the EFL context. With the aim of addressing this gap in the literature, the current study compared the influence of different learning conditions on phrasal verb knowledge development. The 77 EFL participants were divided into two experimental groups (incidental learning versus enhanced exposure) and a control group. While the incidental learning group read the target phrasal verbs within restaurant reviews, the enhanced exposure group had the phrasal verbs bolded and underlined in the same texts and the control group did not receive any treatment. The participants’ performance on the post-test revealed a clear advantage for enhanced exposure over incidental learning. The results also revealed a significant relationship between the participants’ prior vocabulary knowledge and their phrasal verb knowledge, and that opacity and vocabulary knowledge modulated learning gains. The results are discussed in light of the existing literature. Pedagogical implications and directions for future research are highlighted.
This study investigates whether Moroccan undergraduate EFL learners use phrasal verbs in the same way native speakers do or not. To achieve this objective, written learner corpus data are compared against similar data representing native English. The study focuses on two aspects of phrasal-verb use: the absolute co-occurrence frequency of verbs and particles and the degree of verb-particle attraction. Building on Gilquin's (2014) model of the constructional network of phrasal verbs, the present study distinguishes between three levels of analysis: the higher level of the phrasal verb 'superconstruction', the intermediate level of the constructions, and the lower level of analysis, which contains specific phrasal verbs. Nevertheless, contrary to Gilquin's model, the model used in this study extends the intermediate level of constructions to include, in addition to the [V Prt]i, [V Prt OBJ] and [V OBJ Prt] constructions, the passive transitive construction [V Prt]pt. In general, the results show that whether Moroccan undergraduate EFL learners use phrasal verbs in the same way native speakers do or not is dependent on: (1) the level of abstraction that is under analysis; (2) the native language variety that the learners' corpus data is compared against; and (3) the aspect of use of phrasal verbs that is under analysis. Ultimately, findings of this study inform EFL teachers and curriculum/syllabus designers in relation to how phrasal verbs should be introduced to the learners and how the learners' knowledge of these constructions should be assessed.
Both the paperback edition and the hardbound edition of The Language of Humor (by Alleen and Don Nilsen) with Cambridge University Press are now available in England and in the United States. Please check out the web site: https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/language-of-humor/B37E80D6A21DB3A2E344A4061D996D9C .
There is a PowerPoint to accompany each of the twenty-five chapters in this book. Please contact Don Nilsen don.nilsen@asu.edu to receive a thumb drive containing these twenty-five PowerPoints. Thanks.
Schachter (1974) drew attention to the importance, in error analysis, of examining not only the L2 forms actually produced by the learners of a foreign language in their attempts to express themselves in L2, but also the L2 forms they seem consistently to avoid using. She also noted the close interrelation between such avoidance phenomena and the Contrastive Analysis approach to L2 teaching and learning: avoidance is the reverse side of negative transfer, since learners tend to avoid using in L2 those structures that have no parallel in their L1 and therefore provide them with no pattern for transfer. Of course, as Kleinmann (1977) has pointed out, “avoidance” implies that the structure in question is known to (i.e., can be passively recognized by) the learners, but not freely used by them; failure to use a structure or word that is unknown to the learners is an indication merely of ignorance, not of learning difficulty. Now a prime constructive purpose of error analysis is (or should be) to identify the sources of a learner's difficulties, as a necessary preliminary to helping him or her overcome them. Hence the importance of genuine avoidance phenomena that, when properly identified, can throw light on what would otherwise remain hidden recesses of uncertainty in the learner's mind. Levenston (1971) has convincingly argued, with numerous illustrations, that avoidance (“under-representation” in his terminology) of various English “clause (or group) structures” by Hebrew-speaking learners of English can be explained by the lack of Hebrew “translation-equivalents” for the English structures in question and the learners' consequent choice of less appropriate but more L1-equivalent structures. However, since Levenston was concerned not with avoidance phenomena as such, but rather with the evidence they provide of L1 interference with L2 learning and their stylistic effect on the learner's L2, he took the phenomena in question as established facts (on the basis, presumably, of his own teaching experience), without attempting to examine their frequency and extent.
Among the structural and lexical factors claimed to account for avoidance in second language learning are (a) cross-linguistic difference, (b) cross-linguistic similarity, and (c) intrinsic complexity of the second language features avoided. This paper examines patterns of avoidance and preference for phrasal verbs or equivalent single-word verbs among Swedish learners of English. We assumed that if the subjects avoided English phrasal verbs, particularly the figurative ones, even though phrasal verbs exist in Swedish, this would indicate that inherent semantic difficulty of second language forms was the main factor contributing to the avoidance behavior. If, on the other hand, the learners did not show any preference for one-word verb forms in English, or indeed favored the phrasal forms, this would support the assumption that avoidance or nonavoidance depends largely on differences or similarities between the native and the foreign language.
A multiple-choice test and a translation test were given to two groups of advanced Swedish-speaking learners of English. Each test consisted of 20 sentences, allowing for the choice of either a phrasal or a synonymous single-word verb. The test answers showed that the Swedish learners avoided neither phrasal verbs in general nor the figurative ones in particular, regardless of whether the verbs were similar to, or different from, their Swedish translation equivalents. Furthermore, the results were compared to the avoidance patterns of a group of advanced Hebrew-speaking learners of English. From the comparison it emerged that the Swedish learners usedsignificantly more phrasal verbs than the Israelis, notably figurative ones. These results suggest that the avoidance is determined more by a systemic incongruence between the first language (L1) and the second language (L2) than by the inherent difficulty of L2 forms.
The 'time'-away construction, exemplified by We slept the whole afternoon away, proves to have a complex set of syntactic and semantic properties. In particular, the NP the whole afternoon behaves syntactically like a direct object, even though it is clearly not licensed by the verb sleep. This construction is shown to be distinct from two others that it superficially resembles, the resultative and the way-construction. It is also compared with a number of other semi-idiomatic VP constructions. Two approaches for licensing the NP object are compared: a lexical rule approach, in which sleep away is treated as a complex verb that licenses the object, and a constructional approach, in which V NP away is listed as a meaning-bearing construction that licenses both the verb and the object.
Obwohl den phrasal verbs in letzter Zeit von Linguisten und Lexikographen größere Aufmerksamkeit zuteil wurde, sind die Probleme, die sie für Lehrende und Lernende des Englischen mit sich bringen, noch weitgehend ungeklärt. Wie der Autor durch einen Test nachweisen kann, haben selbst fortgeschrittene Lernende des Englischen in der Regel nur sehr dürftige Kenntnisse vom aktiven Gebrauch der phrasal verbs. Es werden Gründe für diese Schwierigkeiten diskutiert. Der Autor zieht den Schluß, daß es unrealistisch ist, von den Lernenden des Englischen die aktive Beherrschung einer großen Menge von phrasal verbs zu verlangen. Statt dessen sollte ein Kernbestand zugrundegelegt werden, der zusätzlich in je eine Liste für den aktiven und den passiven Gebrauch unterteilt wird. Am Schluß werden Kriterien für die Auswahl eines solchen Kernbestands diskutiert, und es wird eine vorläufige Beispielliste aufgestellt.
Phrasal verbs create special problems for students, partly because there are so many of them, but also because the combination of verb and particle seems so often completely random. These difficulties are sometimes increased by the way in which phrasal verbs are presented in course books or by teachers telling students that they will just have to learn them by heart, thereby implying that there is no system. However, if one looks closely at the particle, patterns start to emerge which suggest that the combinations are not so random after all. A more flexible approach to the relationships between phrasal verbs enables the outline of a system to establish itself. This article looks at how this system works and also at the implications for teachers and course book writers.
This article follows up on a study by Dagut and Laufer (1985), who found that Hebrew learners of English avoid phrasal verbs, such as ‘let down’, while preferring one-word verbs, such as ‘;disappoint’, since phrasal verbs do not exist in Hebrew. A corollary derived from Dagut and Laufer's study is that Dutch learners of English would tend not to avoid English phrasal verbs, since phrasal verbs also exist in Dutch. It was hypothesized, however, that Dutch learners of English as a second language (ESL) would avoid phrasal verbs, too, not for structural, but for semantic reasons. Three tests (multiple choice, memorization, and translation) were administered to intermediate and advanced Dutch learners of English. Each test contained 15 sentences, eliciting preference for either a phrasal verb or an equivalent one-word verb. The results show that, as expected, Dutch learners of English do not avoid phrasal verbs categorically. However, they seem to avoid those idiomatic phrasal verbs that they perceive as too Dutch-like (lack of contrast between the first and second language). Furthermore, they exhibit a tendency to adopt a play-it-safe strategy, preferring one-word verbs with general, multi-purpose meanings over phrasal verbs with specific, sometimes idiomatic, meanings. It is argued that this semantic play-it-safe strategy may have also played a causal role in the avoidance behavior of the Hebrew ESL learners observed by Dagut and Laufer.(Received April 25 1988)
In the description of such usages as argue away, measure up and zonk out, a venerable orphan comes in from the linguistic cold
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