Phrasal verbs in L2 English: EFL and ESL compared

Although phrasal verbs in English are widely recognized as forming a single unit, as evidenced among others by the fact that they often have a one-word equivalent (e.g. ‘give up’ = ‘abandon’, see Siyanova and Schmitt 2007), they are made up of two elements, a verb and a particle, which are sometimes separated from each other (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 and Davies 2007: 339). This presentation will centre around phrasal verbs with ‘up’, which will be studied in two types of non-native English, namely English as a foreign language (EFL) and English as a second language (ESL). The approach will be corpus-based, relying on the phrasal verbs extracted from written and spoken corpora of EFL (the International Corpus of Learner English and the Louvain International Database of Spoken English Interlanguage) and ESL (different sections of the International Corpus of English), as well as comparable corpora of English as a native language (ENL), namely the Louvain Corpus of Native English Essays, the Louvain Corpus of Native English Conversation and the British component of the International Corpus of English. The frequency of phrasal verbs will be compared across the EFL, ESL and ENL corpora, with special focus on the possible differences between speech and writing, since phrasal verbs are often thought to be more typical of speech than of writing (Marks 2005). Preferences in terms of construction will also be compared, and in particular the distinction between V-Obj-Prt and V-Prt-Obj (see also Gilquin 2015). These comparisons should provide insights into the use and possibly processing of phrasal verbs by two types of non-native speakers who both use English as an additional language, but who differ in the way they have acquired it