An analysis of the use of phrasal verbs in English academic writing
| Autor: | Feng-Fan Wei, 魏峰帆 |
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| Rok vydání: | 2010 |
| Druh dokumentu: | 學位論文 ; thesis |
| Popis: | 98 Phrasal verbs are usually considered as an informal feature in English. Textbook writers of English academic writing often suggest learners to avoid using phrasal verbs and to replace them with one-word verbs. Recently some researchers hold different views on the issue. They suggest that most phrasal verbs are neutral in tone and the use of the structure should not be discouraged. Such inconsistent opinions arouse the researcher’s interest to empirically examine the issue. The study set out to investigate the use of phrasal verbs by native speakers and by non-native speakers in English academic writing in the field of applied linguistics. The purposes of the study are: (1) to determine whether native speakers frequently used phrasal verbs in academic writing, (2) to explore whether native speakers preferred to use one-word verbs rather than synonymous phrasal verbs, and (3) to examine whether Taiwanese learners used phrasal verbs in ways different from native speakers. The researcher built two corpora by collecting 200 research articles written by native speakers and 100 theses by Taiwanese graduate students majoring in applied linguistics or English language teaching. After the compilation of the corpora, the researchers further conducted quantitative analysis to examine the use of phrasal verbs in the two corpora. The analysis yielded several interesting findings. First, phrasal verbs were not frequently used in the two corpora of the study. The native speakers and the non-native speakers used the structure around 1100 and 1600 times per million words respectively. The frequencies were all lower than those of the other written corpora. Second, although both native speakers and non-native speakers did not use the structure frequently, the non-native speakers used it significantly more than native speakers. Third, both native speaker and non-native speakers only used a few phrasal verbs in academic writing. The 25 most frequent phrasal verbs in the NS corpus accounted for 70% of the occurrence of all phrasal verbs in the corpus. In the NNS corpus, the 25 most frequent phrasal verbs even accounted for 80% of the occurrence of all phrasal verbs. Third, both native speakers and non-native speakers preferred to use one-word verbs rather than their two-word counterparts. However, the non-native speakers used phrasal verbs more than the native speakers. The comparison of the use of phrasal verbs in the two corpora showed that out of 49 phrasal verbs occurring more than five times in either the NS or the NNS corpus, non-native speakers overused 13 and underused four phrasal verbs. The overuse suggested that the non-native speakers were not aware of the register and the collocational restrictions of some phrasal verbs. In addition, the overuse could also be attributed to the influence of the speakers’ first language. The underuse, on the other hand, may result from the insufficient language input or the avoidance strategy adopted by the learners to avoid making mistakes. Based on the findings in the present study, the researcher proposed some pedagogical implications and offered some possible directions for future studies. |
| Databáze: | Networked Digital Library of Theses & Dissertations |
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