The General Academic Phrasal Verb List: A List of the Most Frequent Phrasal Verbs and Their Predominant Meaning Senses in General Academic English

English phrasal verbs (PVs) are a category of multiword verbs that are notorious for being difficult to learn by L2 learners of English. While efforts have been made in recent years to develop pedagogical PV materials that could help learners master this category, developments in this regard remain scarce in the field of English for Academic Purposes (EAP). PVs tend to be poorly described in traditional EAP pedagogical materials, which may be attributed to the fact that the category has been traditionally associated with non-academic genres, such as fiction or conversation. The primary aim of this study is to compile a pedagogical list of the most frequently used PVs and their predominant meaning senses in general academic English. The secondary aim of the study is to analyse the distributional patterns of PVs and their meaning senses in general academic English in order to examine the extent to which PVs should be taught at the level of EAP courses. The methods applied in this study resulted in the compilation of a list of 72 most frequently used PV lemmas and their 117 most frequent meaning senses in general academic English. The results of the analysis suggest that while PVs are less likely to be used in general academic English than in other genres, they are subject to unique distributional and semantic patterns in general academic English, which speaks in favour of teaching academic PVs and their meaning senses as part of EAP courses.