The use of phrasal verbs by French-speaking EFL learners. A constructional and collostructional corpus-based approach
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Gaëtanelle Gilquin
Gaëtanelle Gilquin is a Research Associate with the Belgian National Fund for Scientific Research (FNRS) and a part-time lecturer at the Université catholique de Louvain, Belgium. Her research interests include the use of (native and learner) corpora for descriptive and pedagogical purposes, the integration of corpus linguistics with cognitive linguistics and construction grammar, and the links of these cognitive theories with second language acquisition and foreign language teaching. She is the coordinator of the Louvain International Database of Spoken English Interlanguage (LINDSEI) and one of the founding members of the Learner Corpus Association.
Abstract
This paper investigates the use of phrasal verbs by French-speaking foreign learners of English, using spoken and written learner corpus data and comparing them against similar data representing native English. It adopts a constructional approach, which distinguishes between three levels of analysis: the higher level of the phrasal verb ‘superconstruction’, the intermediate level of the structural patterns [V Prt], [V Prt OBJ] and [V OBJ Prt], and the lower level of lexically specified phrasal verbs. The approach is also collostructional in that it seeks to bring to light lexical associations at the constructional level. The results show that the difficulties that learners are known to have with phrasal verbs are mainly situated at the level of the superconstruction; at the lower levels of analysis (especially the intermediate one), on the other hand, learners seem to have largely internalised the main features of the constructions. More generally, the paper highlights the benefits of combining Construction Grammar and learner corpus research to gain insights into the L2 construction.
About the author
Gaëtanelle Gilquin is a Research Associate with the Belgian National Fund for Scientific Research (FNRS) and a part-time lecturer at the Université catholique de Louvain, Belgium. Her research interests include the use of (native and learner) corpora for descriptive and pedagogical purposes, the integration of corpus linguistics with cognitive linguistics and construction grammar, and the links of these cognitive theories with second language acquisition and foreign language teaching. She is the coordinator of the Louvain International Database of Spoken English Interlanguage (LINDSEI) and one of the founding members of the Learner Corpus Association.
©2015 by De Gruyter Mouton
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- Frontmatter
- The ‘Learner Corpus Research, Cognitive Linguistics and Second Language Acquisition’ nexus: a SWOT analysis
- A multifactorial approach to linguistic structure in L2 spoken and written registers
- The use of phrasal verbs by French-speaking EFL learners. A constructional and collostructional corpus-based approach
- Combining experimental data and corpus data: Intermediate French-speaking learners and the English present
- Conceptual tools for the description and acquisition of the German posture verb sitzen
- Choice and pronunciation of words: Individual differences within a homogeneous group of speakers
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Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- The ‘Learner Corpus Research, Cognitive Linguistics and Second Language Acquisition’ nexus: a SWOT analysis
- A multifactorial approach to linguistic structure in L2 spoken and written registers
- The use of phrasal verbs by French-speaking EFL learners. A constructional and collostructional corpus-based approach
- Combining experimental data and corpus data: Intermediate French-speaking learners and the English present
- Conceptual tools for the description and acquisition of the German posture verb sitzen
- Choice and pronunciation of words: Individual differences within a homogeneous group of speakers
- Generating data as a proxy for unavailable corpus data: the contextualized sentence completion task
