The English phrasal verb combinations are one of the most notoriously challenging aspects of English language instruction (Siyanova and Schmitt, 2007). Cowie (1994, p. 38) looks at them as “a nettle that has to be grasped if students are to achieve native-like proficiency in speech and writing.” These combinations are not only a source of problem for EFL and ESL speakers of non-Germanic languages but also a source of nuisance for the native speakers of other-than-English Germanic languages. Despite their rather complicated structure and unpredictable meaning of some combination types, phrasal verbs are of high relevance for ESL/EFL learners because a grasp of them “can be a great asset to learners in acquiring a new language” (Celce-Murcia and Larsen-Freeman, 1999).
The problems that ESL/EFL learners experience in learning and using phrasal verbs are motivated by a number of factors. First, they are a phenomenon of the Germanic language family (Celce-Murcia and Larsen-Freeman 1999), and language learners in general and non-Germanic learners in particular often experience difficulty when coming across these forms. Second, some forms are found to be associated with a host of semantic complexity. There exist not only literal and idiomatic meanings of some combinations, but each unit might have a range of idiomatic word senses. Third, new combinations are constantly coined and their production is known as “an outpouring of lexical creativeness that surpasses anything else in our language” (Bolinger, 1971, p. xi). Fourth, some of these structures might assume more than one grammatical form. Fifth, not only are they frequent in informal contexts but also abound in highly academic registers. Finally, the particle element of phrasal verbs may serve different grammatical functions.
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