The Phrasal-Prepositional Verbs in Philippine English: A Corpus-based Analysis

31st Pacific Asia Conference on Language, Information and Computation (PACLIC 31), pages 34–41 Cebu City, Philippines, November 16-18, 2017 Copyright c⃝2017 Jennibelle Ella and Shirley Dita The Phrasal-Prepositional Verbs in Philippine English: A Corpus-based Analysis Jennibelle R. Ella Shirley N. Dita De La Salle University Manila De La Salle University Manila jennibelle.ella@gmail.com shirley.dita@gmail.com Abstract The study determines the most common forms of phrasal-prepositional verbs (PPVs) in Philippine English using the ICE-PHI and describes their syntactic and semantic features, following Quirk et al.’s (1985) framework. Thirty nine out of the forty-eight words from the list of Quirk et al. (1985) and Biber et al. (1999) were found in the corpus using AntConc 3.4. Results show that come up with, get out of, look forward to, come out with, hold on to, and catch up with are the most frequently used PPVs by Filipinos. These PPVs occur in active voice. They are intransitive verbs and are also inseparable. Findings further reveal that the meanings of the PPVs are the same as the single-word verb meanings provided by the online dictionaries of phrasal verbs, and those single-word verb meanings can replace the PPVs. Hence, they are idiomatic. The study implies that Filipinos use minimal number of PPVs. They appear to be conservative in their choice of PPV structure, but generally show proficiency in using PPVs in their utterances. 1 Introduction Multi-word verbs (henceforth MWVs) are word combinations often used by native speakers in conversation because of their colloquial tone (Biber, Johansson, Leech, Conrad, & Finegan, 1999). To distinguish MWVs from other complex verb forms, Quirk, Greenbaum, Leech, and Svartvik (1985) classified MWVs into phrasal verb, prepositional verb, and phrasal-prepositional verbs. A phrasal verb consists of a verb and a particle and is either intransitive or transitive. An intransitive phrasal verb functions like a predication adjunct inseparable from its lexical verb (e.g. The plane has now taken off.) while a transitive phrasal verb requires a direct object (e.g. Victoria will set up the equipment.). Moreover, a prepositional verb has a lexical verb and a preposition with which it is semantically and/or syntactically associated (e.g. Look at the billboards.). And finally, a phrasal-prepositional verb (henceforth PPV) takes a verb, an adverb, and a preposition, with two main structural patterns: verb+ particle + preposition +NP (e.g. Jason had to keep away from salty snacks.) and verb + NP + particle + preposition + NP (e.g. They fobbed her off with a cheap perfume.). According to Quirk et al. (1985), “many of them have idiomatic metaphorical meanings which are difficult or impossible to paraphrase” (p. 1179). Interestingly, corpora-based studies have made it relatively easier to determine the typical behavior of the MWV expressions in both spoken and written discourse (Gardner & Davies, 2007; Ryoo, 2013; Biber et al., 1999). More so, a shift of approach on phrasal verbs, from the traditional to the cognitive, has greatly helped non-native speakers in understanding how productive the particles are (Cubillo, 2002; Kiativutikul and Phoocharoensil, 2014; Garcia-Vega, 2011). For instance, the …

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