Phrasal verbs as multiword units: A comparison of EFL and ESL

Gilquin, Gaëtanelle [UCL]

Phrasal verbs in English have been described as multiword verbs, because they are made up of two elements, a verb and a particle, but essentially behave like a single verb (see Quirk et al. 1985: 1150). Unlike some other multiword units whose composition is fixed, however, the two elements of the phrasal verb are separated from each other in certain contexts (e.g. ‘He filled it up’). This special feature makes the phrasal verb a particularly interesting multiword unit to investigate, especially among non-native speakers of English, since phrasal verbs are said to be “one of the most notoriously challenging aspects of English language instruction” (Gardner & Davies 2007: 339). This paper centres around phrasal verbs with ‘up’ in two types of non-native English, namely English as a foreign language (EFL) and English as a second language (ESL), using data from ICLE, LINDSEI and ICE as well as reference corpus data representing English as a native language (ENL). In an earlier study (Gilquin 2015), it was shown that phrasal verbs tend to be underused in both EFL and ESL, but that ESL displays a more native-like stylistic distribution, with phrasal verbs being more frequent in speech than in writing. In this follow-up study, the focus is on the link between the verb (V) and the particle (P), and more precisely on their possible separation by an object (O), resulting in the distinction between VPO and VOP constructions. Two research questions are addressed: (i) How do EFL and ESL varieties compare with each other with respect to the distribution of phrasal verbs between VPO and VOP constructions? (ii) Do EFL and ESL users display different preferences in terms of the verbs they combine with ‘up’ in VPO vs VOP constructions? It is hypothesized that, because of the higher degree of exposure to English in ESL than in EFL environments (see, e.g., Biewer 2011), phrasal verbs in ESL should be used in a more native-like manner than in EFL. After extracting all the occurrences of ‘up’ from the different corpora and manually discarding the instances where ‘up’ was not part of a phrasal verb, the remaining c. 7,000 phrasal verbs were encoded as to their structure (VPO or VOP), the nature and length of the object (if any), and the verb used. For the second research question, distinctive collexeme analyses were carried out by means of Coll.analysis (Gries 2007). The results show that the verb and the particle are more often kept together (VPO) in EFL than in ESL, and that the latter is more similar to ENL in that respect. Interestingly, the two non-native varieties appear to use VPO even with very short nominal objects and some pronouns, which is less often the case in ENL. The choice of verbs in both EFL and ESL appears to be more native-like with VPO than with VOP. These results partly confirm the more native-like command of phrasal verbs in ESL than in EFL, and also point to the better entrenchment of VPO than VOP in both non-native varieties. Possible explanations for these findings will be discussed.