Abstract:
Due to L2 English speakers’ immense difficulties with phrasal verbs (PVs), this study will focus extensively on investigating their semantic usages and their distributions across the spoken and academic registers. Although other studies have taken registers into account when analyzing PVs, no other study has specifically analyzed the correlation between the register of the PV and its subsequent meaning. Using the Spoken and Written Academic English sub-corpora of the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA) as data, this study analyzed semantic usages of the 150 most frequently used PVs in both the academic and spoken registers in order to evaluate if their most frequent senses remained consistent across the two registers. The findings suggest register and context plays a crucial role in the semantic usage distributions of the PVs. With this information in regards to the relationship between PV meaning and registers, L2 English students will be better equipped when evaluating the PVs they encounter in their textbooks and everyday conversations.
