A Corpus-based Study Of Particle Position In English Phrasal Verbs By Chinese EFL Learners

Phrasal verb is an important component of English idioms,and is widely used in written and spoken part of English.However,phrasal verbs are proved to be a difficult point for EFL learners due to its various semantics and complex structures,thus it has become the focus and hot spot of researchers.At present,there are three aspects of the study on English phrasal verbs: the traditional syntactic and semantic studies,the cognitive studies and the corpus-based studies.The traditional syntactic and semantic studies lay emphasis on its structure and meaning;the cognitive studies use cognitive linguistic theories to analyze the semantic features of the two components and the corpus-based studies often employ the contrastive analysis to investigate the learning status of English phrasal verbs of EFL learners,and most of them are about error analysis.Concerned about the present research status of English phrasal verbs,there are limited studies which combine the corpus with syntactic and semantic approaches to explore the usage of English phrasal verbs and there are less based on the cognitive linguistic theories.Therefore,the present study will base on SWECCL and BNC-web to study the acquisition of English phrasal verbs with different particle positions.This study is designed to address the three questions:(1)What are the differences of particle position in spoken English in the use of phrasal verbs between Chinese EFL learners and native English speakers?(2)What are the differences of particle position in written English in the use of phrasal verbs between Chinese EFL learners and native English speakers?(3)What are the reasons that cause the difference of particle position between Chinese EFL learners and native English speakers in the usage of phrasal verbs?On the basis of above three questions,the conclusions are drawn below.First of all,in written part,Chinese EFL learners are more willing to use continuous(VP)structure,that is,the particle follows the verb closely,and the overall standard frequency is higher than native English speakers.While in some specific phrasal verbs,there are obvious overused and underused sets.For some familiar phrasal verbs,Chinese EFL learners tend to use them repetitively and avoid using those unfamiliar sets.With regard to verb types,Chinese EFL learners tend to use phrasal verbs formed by Action verbs and Moving verbs rather than that of stative verbs in written English.Secondly,in spoken part,Chinese learners' use of those phrasal verbs is inferior to the written part as well as native speakers as a whole.The phenomenon of overuse and underuse is obvious in three patterns.Chinese learners overuse some commonly used sets and avoid using those unfamiliar phrasal verbs,among which V*P pattern is the least used,which shows that Chinese learners lack consciousness to insert single word object between the verb and the particle,but choose more continuous structures and the discontinuous structure to insert multi-word object.In terms of verb types,the use of phrasal verbs in spoken and written language is in a same manner.They prefer to use phrasal verbs composed of dynamic verbs.Thirdly,there are some differences in using phrasal verbs with different particle positions between Chinese EFL learners and native English learners,after analyzing the object collocations,this thesis finds that there is not much difference in VP pattern in object collocations,but a wider range of object collocates are used by natives than that of by Chinese EFL learners.At the same time,what could be stressed is that for the lack of adequate vocabulary,Chinese learners tend to use these objects repetitively.Moreover,there exist some obvious collocate errors in their spoken tasks,which also reveal the cognitive defects of Chinese learners on the latter two relatively complex structures.In terms of the above findings,based on the object collocation,this thesis puts forward some corresponding reasons from the angle of inadequate sufficient input,pedagogical ignorance and avoidance usage of phrasal verbs to provide possible guidance for learning and teaching process.What's more,implications are put forward together with the prospect of future studies.