The ups and downs of phrasal verbs in spoken and written Learner Englishes

It has regularly been pointed out in the literature that EFL learners tend to be largely unaware of register variation, and in particular that they use spoken-like features in their written production (see, e.g., Altenberg & Tapper 1998, Granger & Rayson 1998, Gilquin & Paquot 2008). This has appeared from comparisons between corpora of written learner English and corpora of spoken and written native English, which show that the written learner corpora often display features more typical of native speech than of native writing (for example first and second person pronouns or amplifying adverbs). Thanks to the recent availability of learner corpora of speech, it has now become possible to bring spoken interlanguage into the equation, and thus consider problems of register confusion in both writing and speech. In this presentation, I will investigate the use of phrasal verbs, a particularly difficult area of language for learners of English, in two learner corpora, namely the International Corpus of Learner English (ICLE; Granger et al. 2009), representing written interlanguage, and the Louvain International Database of Spoken English Interlanguage (LINDSEI; Gilquin et al. 2010). Both corpora include data produced by learners from different mother tongue backgrounds, which makes it possible to investigate the influence of medium among several learner populations. Phrasal verbs being generally recognized as sensitive to register variation (they are said to occur more frequently in speech than in writing, cf. Cornell 1985: 269), they constitute an interesting starting point to examine learners’ stylistic preferences. Here, the focus will be on phrasal verbs with the particles 'up' and 'down'. Relying on comparisons with similar data for native English (from the Louvain Corpus of Native English Essays and the Louvain Corpus of Native English Conversation), the corpus study reveals that learners have a tendency to underuse phrasal verbs with 'up' and 'down', but use them more frequently in writing (ICLE) than in speech (LINDSEI), which is to be contrasted with the situation for native English. The quantitative analysis will be supplemented by a qualitative analysis, which will investigate the types of phrasal verbs that are used by learners in speech and writing, and which will seek to determine whether register confusion is at play in the choice of phrasal verbs too. More generally, the study will try to explain learners’ distinctive “stylistic signatures” (Gilquin et al. 2007: 322) by referring to the context in which English as a foreign language is usually learned