A Corpus Linguistics Investigation into Phrasal Verbs in British Academic Spoken English
A Corpus Linguistics Investigation into Phrasal Verbs in British Academic Spoken English

Summary/Abstract: This current study aims to shed a new light into the usage of phrasal verbs, which are one of the most avoided multi-word constructions for English learners but widely used by native speakers of English in BASE (British Academic Spoken English). The purpose of this study is to identify which phrasal verbs are used more frequently in BASE and how the findings might be utilized in educational settings. To do this, three lexical verbs (go, come and take) combining phrasal verbs with nine adverbial particles and forming 27 phrasal verbs were analysed using 1.742.886 running words in BASE. BNC (British National Corpus) was used as the core data for selecting lexical verbs and adverbial particles by benefiting from the research of Gardner and Davies (2007). The results reveal some similarities between BNC and BASE in terms of phrasal verb usage and the paper exemplifies some ways to teach phrasal verbs in the light of the analyses.

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