Pointing Out Frequent Phrasal Verbs: A Corpus‐Based Analysis

Abstract

This study attempts to shed new light on one of the most notoriously challenging aspects of English language instruction—the English phrasal verbs. The highest frequency phrasal verb constructions in the 100‐million‐word British National Corpus are identified and analyzed. The findings indicate that a small subset of 20 lexical verbs combines with eight adverbial particles (160 combinations) to account for more than one half of the 518,923 phrasal verb occurrences identified in the megacorpus. A more specific analysis indicates that only 25 phrasal verbs account for nearly one third of all phrasal‐verb occurrences in the British National Corpus, and 100 phrasal verbs account for more than one half of all such items. Subsequent semantic analyses show that these 100 high‐frequency phrasal verb forms have potentially 559 variant‐meaning senses. The authors discuss how learners, teachers, and materials developers might utilize the findings of the study to improve instruction of phrasal verbs in English language education.