期刊名称：Baltic Journal of English Language, Literature and Culture
印刷版ISSN：1691-9971
电子版ISSN：2501-0395
出版年度：2020
卷号：10
页码：36-53
DOI：10.22364/BJELLC.10.2020.03
语种：English
出版社：University of Latvia Press
摘要：Phrasal verbs, though very common in the English language, are acknowledged as difficult to acquire by non-native learners of English. The present study examines this issue focusing on two learner groups from different mother tongue backgrounds, i.e. Lithuanian and Polish advanced students of English. The analysis is conducted based on Granger's (1996) Contrastive Interlanguage Analysis methodology, investigating the Lithuanian and Polish components of the International Corpus of Learner English, as well as the Louvain Corpus of Native English Essays. The results obtained in the study prove that both learner groups underuse phrasal verbs compared with native English speakers. It is concluded that this could be due to the learners' limited repertoire of phrasal verbs as they employ significantly fewer phrasal verb types than native speakers. Furthermore, it is noticed that learners face similar stylistic, semantic and syntactic difficulties in the use of this language feature. In particular, the analysis shows that such errors might be caused by native language interference, as well as the inherent complexity of phrasal verbs. The present study not only helps to account for the challenges that are common to those language groups which lack phrasal verbs in their linguistic repository, but also provides insights into the understanding of advanced learner language.
