A comparable corpus-based study of phrasal verbs in academic writing by English and Chinese scholars across disciplines

Abstract

This paper reports on a comparative investigation into the differences and similarities in the use of phrasal verbs (pvs) by L1 English and L1 Chinese scholars (ess and css) in academic English writing. Using a corpus of research articles from the fields of Physics, Computer Science, Linguistics and Management written by ess and css, we present data to reveal that: ( i) pvs are used in both css’ and ess’ research articles across disciplines; ( ii) there are significant differences in the use of pvs between css and ess, with css employing pvs less frequently than ess in both types and tokens; ( iii) disciplinary variations have been detected – research articles in soft science disciplines (Linguistics and Management) deploy significantly more pvs and the tendency is particularly so in ess’ research articles; ( iv) both css and ess use the ‘Verb + Adverbial particle + np’ or ‘Verb + np + Adverbial particle’ pattern and the ‘Verb + Preposition + np’ pattern most frequently; and ( v) the majority of the most frequent pvs are shared by css and ess and used in their metaphorical senses. Qualitative analyses of the four selected items demonstrate that the co-selection between the collocating nouns and the structural patterns of pvs decides the senses being realised. These findings shed light on teaching academic writing and provide writers with some guidance on verb choices.