Phrasal verbs in European Parliament conference English: a corpus-based pedagogical list

Abstract

ABSTRACT Phrasal verbs (PVs), comprising a lexical verb and an adverbial particle, are a notoriously difficult category of multiword units even for advanced learners of English because of their syntactic peculiarity and semantic complexity. Non-native professional interpreters have also been found to use PVs much less often than their native counterparts in simultaneous interpreting into English. This study aims to generate a pedagogical list containing the most frequent PVs and their major meanings for conference interpreting purposes. A corpus-based approach was adopted to identify PVs in a 724,054-word corpus comprising transcribed speeches interpreted into or held in English during the European Parliament plenary sessions. Out of a total of 461 PVs, 169 PVs crossed the lowest frequency threshold. They make up 87.07% of all PV occurrences in the corpus, suggesting the dominance of the top 1/3 of the PVs. Semantic analysis showed that the 169 PVs have a relatively small number of key meanings (two on average), and that the primary meanings play a dominant role. Available as an online supplemental material, the European Parliament Conference English Phrasal Verb Pedagogical List (The EP-CE PHaVE List) contains these most frequent 169 PVs, their major meanings, and example sentences extracted from the corpus.