The (non-)use of phrasal verbs in L2 varieties of English

Phrasal verbs are ‘one of the most notoriously challenging aspects of English language instruction’ (Gardner & Davies 2007: 339). Moon (1997: 46) gives several reasons for this, including the frequency of phrasal verbs, their specialised meanings and, sometimes, opaqueness, their syntactic behaviour (in particular the placement of the object), and their stylistic heterogeneity (some phrasal verbs are unmarked, whereas others are informal or jargonistic). What adds to the complexity is that, for most learners, there will be no equivalent to phrasal verbs in their mother tongue. As a consequence, learners will often misuse phrasal verbs and underuse them (or avoid them altogether, cf. Dagut and Laufer 1985). In this presentation, I will be interested in L2 learners’ use of English phrasal verbs, and more particularly phrasal verbs that contain what is, according to the ‘Longman Grammar of Spoken and Written English’ (Biber et al. 1999), the most frequent particle in phrasal verbs, namely ‘up’. The focus will be on learners who learn English as a foreign language. We will see how factors such as mother tongue (L1), knowledge of other foreign languages, exposure to the target language and medium (speech vs. writing) affect the use of phrasal verbs in learner English. Preliminary studies of phrasal verbs with ‘up’ in ICLE (International Corpus of Learner English) and LINDSEI (Louvain International Database of Spoken English Interlanguage) have already confirmed the importance of some of these factors. Thus, Spanish students, who do not have any phrasal verbs in their L1, are among the learners who use the fewest phrasal verbs with ‘up’, whereas German students, who do have phrasal verbs in their L1, are among the top users. It also appears that, while most learners underuse phrasal verbs with ‘up’, this underuse is even more striking in speech than in writing (in fact, learners tend to use fewer phrasal verbs in speech than in writing, whereas in native English phrasal verbs are actually more common in speech than in writing, cf. Biber et al. 1999). It is also one of the aims of this presentation to compare the use of phrasal verbs by foreign learners and second language learners, thus following a recent and promising trend which seeks to bridge the gap between Learner Englishes (foreign learner varieties) and World Englishes (institutionalised varieties). Some studies have revealed similarities between the two types of varieties (Nesselhauf forthcoming; see also the recent workshop organised at the ISLE conference on ‘Second-language varieties and learner Englishes’) and we will see whether this tendency is also noticeable in the field of phrasal verbs. This will lead us to a discussion about the distinction between errors and creative uses.