Phrasal Verbs: German and Italian Learners of English Compared

Phrasal verbs are pervasive in all registers of English and make this language highly idiomatic. Due to their syntactic, semantic, and idiomatic complexity, however, phrasal verbs present an immense learning load even for advanced learners. Their meaning can usually not be derived from the individual meanings of its elements; they are often polysemous and submitted to contextual restrictions. From a contrastive point of view, phrasal verbs correspond only partly to similar constructions in the native languages of German and Italian learners. Both learner groups are thus confronted with a verb type which, on the one hand, is indispensable for idiomatic English but whose teaching, on the other hand, is often neglected in the foreign language classroom. On the basis of detailed quantitative and qualitative analyses of all phrasal verbs extracted from the German and Italian components of the International Corpus of Learner English, the real problems of advanced learners are described. With the consistent comparison of two learner groups, the author aims at contributing to the general understanding of advanced learner language.