The current project investigated the effects of concept-based instruction (CBI) in phrasal verbs learning. CBI was carefully designed on the basis of two important principles of cognitive linguistics (CL): image-schemas and conceptual metaphors. The analysis focused on conceptual development in the participants who were graduate students registered in an ESL speaking course. Specifically, the influence of the image schema and conceptual metaphor was examined with various data sets. This study focuses on one of the datasets, verbalization tasks. They were provided as a homework assignment to familiarize participants with the new way of understanding particles and phrasal verbs and to internalize the relevant image schemas and conceptual metaphors by externalizing their understanding. The analysis showed that the metaphorical and imagistic associations that students made had a strong impact on their subsequent accounts of the meanings of the phrasal verbs. The metaphorical and imagistic performance of some students demonstrated that CBI can fundamentally impact on learner understanding of the semantics of particles and phrasal verbs.

Previous research developed lists of the most frequently used phrasal verbs in native English corpora. This study aims to discover how these high frequency phrasal verbs were presented in high school English textbooks in Korea. A high school English textbook corpus comprising 189,203 words taken from the listening scripts and reading passages of eight different textbook series was developed for the study. A corpus-based analysis of phrasal verbs revealed that each textbook series covered only 30% of most commonly used phrasal verbs in native corpora. In addition, the phrasal verbs used in the different textbook series rarely overlapped, suggesting a lack of systematic selection process. Among the recursive phrasal verbs appearing in the textbook series, high frequency phrasal verbs were more likely to be recursive and evenly distributed. A comparative analysis conducted with a referential corpus revealed that the textbooks employed fewer phrasal verbs than their comparative counterparts. In terms of meaning, 91% of high frequency phrasal verbs in the textbooks delivered their most frequent meanings while the rest 9% did not. The results of this study support the necessity of pedagogical guidelines for phrasal verbs.

Some multiword verbs like run into ‘encounter’ in She ran into a friend have been called by two distinct names in the literature. They are prepositional verbs (with a fixed and specified preposition) or (inseparable or nonseparable) transitive phrasal verbs. This paper argues that this different use of terminology for the same multiword verbs actually reveals the nature of the whole class they belong to. The class is a cline of grammatical elements and properties between prepositional verbs and transitive phrasal verbs, and the set shared by these two subclasses is the locus of that cline. This characteristic mode of the cline is explained in terms of intersective constructional gradience and multiple inheritance.

It has been generally assumed that phrasal verbs in English are primitive in nature, either as a base form or as a derived form. Even the latest studies posit that the alternative surface forms of a transitive phrasal verb such as take out in take the trash out and take out the trash are constructed from that phrasal verb itself by verb movement. This paper argues that phrasal verbs are not purely primitives but possibly derivatives. They can be derived from their reverse combinations, what we call particle verbs. The paper supports this argument by examining a set of transitive particle verbs in English, e.g. downplay in downplay the incident. It also uses the notion of verb movement and proposes a unified analysis of both the particle verbs and their V-P alternants such as play down the incident and play the incident down.

This paper aims to develop a derivational approach to the syntactic alternation of English transitive phrasal verbs such as take out the rubbish and take the rubbish out. It is argued that these two alternative verb phrases (VP) are equally derived from their more primitive rule or construction. This construction is often called ‘complex verb (or predicate)’ and notated as [V V P]. The complex verb structure interacts with the standard VP-shell structure through the canonical verb movement to yield the two alternative forms. The paper also offers suggestions for other issues that arise from the suggested analysis.