The use of phrasal verbs by French-speaking EFL learners. A constructional and collostructional corpus-based approach

Gilquin, Gaëtanelle [UCL]

This paper investigates the use of phrasal verbs by French-speaking foreign learners of English, using spoken and written learner corpus data and comparing them against similar data representing native English. It adopts a constructional approach, which distinguishes between three levels of analysis: the higher level of the phrasal verb ‘superconstruction’, the intermediate level of the structural patterns [V Prt], [V Prt OBJ] and [V OBJ Prt], and the lower level of lexically specified phrasal verbs. The approach is also collostructional in that it seeks to bring to light lexical associations at the constructional level. The results show that the difficulties that learners are known to have with phrasal verbs are mainly situated at the level of the superconstruction; at the lower levels of analysis (especially the intermediate one), on the other hand, learners seem to have largely internalised the main features of the constructions. More generally, the paper highlights the benefits of combining Construction Grammar and learner corpus research to gain insights into the L2 constructicon.