Masaryk University

Faculty of Arts

Department of English
and American Studies

Teaching English Language and Literature for

Secondary Schools

Jan Štěrba

Phrasal Verbs in the British National

Corpus and ELT Textbooks
Master’s Diploma Thesis

Supervisor: Mgr. František Tůma, Ph. D.

2018
 I declare that I have worked on this thesis independently,
using only the primary and secondary sources listed in the bibliography.

……………………………………………..
Jan Štěrba
 I would like to thank my supervisor Mgr. František Tůma, Ph.D., for his time, kindness,
willingness to help and the excellent feedback he provided me with.
I would also like to thank my original supervisor, doc, PhDr. Naděžda Kudrnáčová, Csc., who
approached Mr. Tůma after my topic had to be changed and thus helped me to finish the thesis
successfully.
I cannot forget to thank James for proofreading the whole thesis as well as my grandfather who
proofread the Czech parts.
I am also very grateful for the support I have received from my family throughout my studies
and finally, I have to thank my girlfriend Janča for simply being out there for me.
 Table of Contents

Introduction.......................................................................................................................9
1. Multi-word Verbs.........................................................................................................13
1.1. Phrasal Verbs.........................................................................................................14
1.1.1. Definition.......................................................................................................14
1.1.2. Other approaches to defining phrasal verbs...................................................16
1.2. Phrasal Verbs vs Prepositional Verbs....................................................................17
1.3. Phrasal Verbs vs Free Combinations....................................................................19
1.4. Phrasal Verbs Tests...............................................................................................20
2. Corpora........................................................................................................................23
2.1. Definition and Main Features...............................................................................23
2.2. Available Corpora.................................................................................................26
2.2.1. British National Corpus..................................................................................26
2.2.2. Other corpora.................................................................................................28
2.3. Sketch Engine.......................................................................................................30
3. Research Overview......................................................................................................33
4. Methodology................................................................................................................41
4.1. The Reference Corpus..........................................................................................41
4.2. The Analysed Textbooks.......................................................................................42
4.2.1. Maturita Solutions..........................................................................................43
4.2.2. New Headway 4th edition...............................................................................44
4.2.3. Insight.............................................................................................................45
4.3. Selection of Phrasal Verbs for the Analysis..........................................................45
4.4. The Analysis Process............................................................................................49
4.4.1. First stage.......................................................................................................50
4.4.2. Second stage...................................................................................................51
4.4.3. Third Stage.....................................................................................................54
5. The Analysis................................................................................................................57
5.1. Frequency counts..................................................................................................60
5.1.1. Headway.........................................................................................................61
5.1.2. Insight.............................................................................................................63
5.1.3. Solutions.........................................................................................................65
5.2. Text Types.............................................................................................................67
5.2.1. Headway.........................................................................................................69
 5.2.2. Insight.............................................................................................................72
5.2.3. Solutions.........................................................................................................75
5.3. Functions of PVs in the Textbooks.......................................................................78
5.3.1. Headway.........................................................................................................80
5.3.1.1. No focus...................................................................................................80
5.3.1.2. Indirect focus...........................................................................................81
5.3.1.3. Direct focus.............................................................................................82
5.3.2. Insight.............................................................................................................85
5.3.2.1. No focus...................................................................................................86
5.3.2.2. Indirect focus...........................................................................................86
5.3.2.3. Direct focus.............................................................................................88
5.3.3. Solutions.........................................................................................................91
5.3.3.1. No focus...................................................................................................92
5.3.3.2. Indirect focus...........................................................................................92
5.3.3.3. Direct focus.............................................................................................94
6. Discussion....................................................................................................................99
6.1. Discussion of Results............................................................................................99
6.2. Limitations of the Analysis.................................................................................104
6.3. Areas of Further Research...................................................................................105
Conclusion.....................................................................................................................107
Bibliography..................................................................................................................109
The Analysed Textbooks............................................................................................109
Other Sources.............................................................................................................109
Resumé in English.........................................................................................................115
Resumé in Czech...........................................................................................................117
Appendix 1....................................................................................................................119
Appendix 2....................................................................................................................127
 Introduction
This thesis will deal with English phrasal verbs, which are considered to be “one of the

most notoriously challenging aspects of English language instruction” (Gardner

& Davies, 2007, p. 339). Because of their difficulty and also unfamiliarity with the

concept of phrasal verbs in many languages, English language learners tend to avoid

them, sometimes even completely (Gardner & Davies, 2007). Mullany and Stockwell

(2010) even refer to them as “the scourge of the learner” (p. 201). Phrasal verbs can be

distinguished at first glance because they consist of two elements – a lexical verb and

an adverbial particle, which is the simplest form of their definition that will be further

elaborated on the following pages. The importance of phrasal verbs is suggested by the

fact that some rather frequent English verbs, such as carry or pick, tend to occur more

often in phrasal verbs constructions than on their own (Gardner & Davies, 2007).

What makes phrasal verbs even more challenging for language users is their rather

unpredictable nature (as far as meaning is concerned) and also the fact that the set

of possible particles is quite limited and therefore one particle might comprise several

meanings when joined to different lexical verbs (Darwin and Gray, 1999).

Despite, or maybe thanks to, their demanding characteristics, phrasal verbs present a

very useful middle ground between syntax and lexis that might be successfully

exploited in second language acquisition (Gass & Selinker, 2001). The main aim of this

thesis is to study the patterns of use of phrasal verbs in intermediate volumes of three

contemporary English textbooks widely used in the Czech Republic – New Headway,

Insight and Maturita Solutions – and compare the findings to the data gained from the

British National Corpus (BNC). Therefore, this thesis has primarily practical focus,

but the needed theoretical background will be provided as well. The structure of this

thesis will be presented in the following paragraphs.

9
The whole thesis is dived into six chapters. The first two chapters will have a primarily

theoretical basis. The first one will predominantly deal with phrasal verbs.

After presenting the notion of multi-word verbs, it will provide an overview of possible

definitions of phrasal verbs and the means of distinguishing them from other multi-word

verbs including free combinations. The second chapter will be concerned with corpora,

which is an essential term for this thesis as the analysis will mostly rely on corpus data.

The main focus will be devoted to the BNC, but information about other available

corpora will be given as well. This chapter will also introduce the Sketch Engine, which

will be then used in one of the analysis stages. Both the theoretical chapters focus solely

on the terms or concepts that are essential for the latter chapters of the thesis and it

should be kept in mind that they are thus not exhaustive.

The purpose of the third chapter is to present an overview of available research, where

phrasal verbs or similar constructions are studied with respect to textbooks and (or)

corpora. The fourth chapter will provide all the necessary information about the

research methodology. First, it will start with the three main research questions of the

analysis:

What are the most frequent phrasal verbs in the textbooks compared to the BNC?

In what types of texts and spoken interactions are phrasal verbs used in the textbooks

compared to the BNC?

In which ways are phrasal verbs used in the textbooks?

This will then be followed by a presentation of the selected textbooks and the reference

corpus, including reasons for their selection. Afterwards, the three stages of the analysis,

where each corresponds to one research question, will be described. The first stage will

be based on the list of the most frequent phrasal verbs in the BNC compiled by Liu

(2011), which will be compared to the findings from the textbooks. The second stage

10
will examine text and spoken interaction types in the BNC using the Sketch Engine

according to the classification proposed by David Lee (2001) and compare it to the

textbook use of phrasal verbs. Finally, the last part of the analysis will study in what

types of exercises phrasal verbs are used in the textbooks.

The two final chapters of this thesis will be the most practical, as they will be concerned

with the analysis itself. The fifth chapter will present the results in three subchapters,

where each will be devoted to the corresponding analysis stage. For the sake of clarity,

each subchapter will include three sections; one for each textbook. This chapter will

primarily make use of tables presented at the beginning of each section and the tables

will then be commented on and interpreted. The last chapter of this thesis will be the

discussion, which will be split into three subchapters. The first one will summarize the

key findings and relate them to the previously introduced research where applicable,

while the second and third will in turn admit some limitations of the thesis and suggest

areas for further research.

11
12
 1. Multi-word Verbs
This chapter will introduce the term multi-word verbs which is crucial for the rest of

this thesis as it also comprises phrasal verbs, which will be of primary concern in the

analysis. Therefore, substantial space will be devoted to them. The other two frequently

distinguished categories of multi-word verbs, prepositional and phrasal-prepositional

verbs, will be also discussed briefly mainly in order to complete the terminological

picture. There are even more types of multi-word verbs in English than the three

provided above, such as verb-adjective or verb-verb combinations but they are rather

rare in English and therefore not discussed here1.

Multi-word verbs are combinations of a lexical verb and one or two other elements,

which are called particles (Quirk, Greenbaum, Leech & Svartvik, 1985), for example

turn up, look after or put up with. The particle can belong to two “distinct but

overlapping categories” (Quirk et al., 1985, 1150) of either adverbs or spatial

prepositions. The most important feature of multi-word verbs is the fact that they form a

unit that behaves like a single word (Downing and Locke, 2006), (Quirk et al., 1985).

This means that they are often not fully transparent in their meaning, or even idiomatic.

Thus, their meaning cannot be predicted from the meanings of their individual parts

(Greenbaum, 1996). Consider the previously mentioned multi-word verb turn up. The

Oxford Phrasal Verb Dictionary for Learners of English lists this verb with the meaning

“to arrive; to happen, especially unexpectedly” (p. 358) which is not comparable to the

conclusion that would be reached if purely the meanings of turn and up were grouped

together. Another common feature of multi-word verbs is the possibility of replacing

them with a single verb (Ballard, 2001). For example, the aforementioned verb turn up

can (in some of its senses) be replaced by the single verb appear.

1 Brief account of those types is provided by Quirk et al. (1985, p. 1167-1168)

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There are several possible ways of classifying multi-word verbs. They can be

differentiated by their grammatical, syntactical or semantical patterns. The following

classification will be based on the grammatical category of their particle (or particles).

Further classification based on transitivity and separability will follow in the next

sections. Biber, Johansson, Leech, Conrad & Finegan (1999) list three main types

of multi-word verbs. Both phrasal and prepositional verbs are combinations of a lexical

verb and one particle. Phrasal verbs contain an adverbial particle (e. g. break down,

look up, take off), while prepositional verbs include particles that serves as

prepositions (come across, get off, look after). Phrasal-prepositional verbs (get away

with, look down on, put up with) have two particles attached to their lexical verb and

can be seen as a combination of both phrasal and prepositional verbs.

Prepositional and phrasal-prepositional verbs will not be included in the textbook

analysis and therefore the next section will focus primarily on phrasal verbs, their

features and the differences between phrasal verbs and other similar constructions.

1.1. Phrasal Verbs

Already identified as one of the main subtypes of multi-word verbs, phrasal verbs are

“one of the most distinctive features of present-day informal English” (Downing

& Locke, 2006, p. 336). One of the primary reasons for this is their enormous

abundance and productivity (Darwin & Gray, 1999). They are also quite common in

English, as corpus data suggests that they appear once in per 150 words (Gardner &

Davies, 2007). The following chapters will provide discussion surrounding their

definition, prevalent features and the methods of distinguishing them from other similar

constructions.

1.1.1. Definition

14
As stated before, phrasal verbs can be, in short, defined as a lexical verb + adverbial

particle combination, which is the definition that will be central to this thesis.

Of course, more elaborate and restrictive formulations exist as well. For example, the

definition provided by Quirk et al. (1985, p. 1150-1152) is formulated in two stages.

According to them, a phrasal verb is a lexical verb followed by an adverbial

morphologically invariable particle, which functions as a single grammatical unit

with the verb. Furthermore, they add that meaning of the combination cannot be

predicted from the meaning of its parts in isolation. That is true for many phrasal verbs,

but Darwin and Gray (1999) mention that phrasal verbs can also have a relatively literal

meaning (for example take down in take down the painting) and Downing and Locke

(2006) even established a category of “non-idiomatic phrasal verbs” (p. 337).

As already pointed out above, phrasal verbs tend to be idiomatic and can be replaced by

a single verb in a large number of cases. They often tend to be less formal than their

single verb counterpart and are rarer in academic writing, although some of them, such

as carry out or point out, are accepted in academia as well (Darwin & Gray, 1999).

Phrasal verbs can be further split into two main domains – intransitive and transitive

(Biber et al., 1999, p. 407). Similarly to the “usual” single verbs, intransitive phrasal

verbs ((1a) and (1b) below) do not need an object, whereas transitive phrasal verbs ((2a)

and (2b)) require a direct object.

(1a) After three hours, he finally gave in.
(1b) Please finally shut up!
(2a) I need to sort out my problems quickly.
(2b) He turned on the TV.
In some cases, transitive phrasal verbs can also take indirect object in addition to the

direct one, as illustrated in the following example (taken from Useful Dictionary of

Phrasal verbs by Martin Manser):

(3) I will now hand you back to Peter Barker in the studio.

15
Where you is the direct and Peter Barker the indirect object of the multi-word verb

hand back. However, such constructions can be seen as having two particles (back and

to in the previous example) and will thus not be treated as phrasal verbs in this thesis.
As Darwin and Gray (1999) pointed out, phrasal verbs behave exactly in the same way

as single verbs, albeit “with one exception” (p. 69). This is the ability of particle

movement and separation which will, together with the other distinctive features

of phrasal verbs, be further discussed in 1.2.

1.1.2. Other approaches to defining phrasal verbs

The definitions provided above are, of course, not the only possible ones. Gardner

and Davies (2007) maintain that “it is rare to read an article about phrasal verbs without

some discussion of definitions” (p. 341). Although the definition is relatively simple, its

application creates discrepancies among linguists (Gardner & Davies, 2007) as well as

among people responsible for making dictionaries and teaching materials. Ballard

(2001) already remarked that the term “phrasal verbs” sometimes encompasses the

whole category of multi-word verbs without mentioning the other two main types

discussed here. Huddlestone and Pullum (2002) do not use the term “phrasal verbs” at

all, claiming that phrasal verbs, “despite their idiomatic interpretations, do not form

syntactic constituents ” (p. 274) any more than expressions such as flew to or send

money to.
Another confusion regarding the term ‘phrasal verbs’ may be found in English

textbooks. As Oliveira and Avezedo (2012) observed, “English textbook authors tend

to oversimplify the explanation of these types of verbs using inappropriate terminology”

(p. 4). The main problem is introducing solely the term of phrasal verbs without

mentioning their hypernym, multi-word verbs. No distinction is also quite often made

between adverbial and prepositional particles (Oliveira & Avezedo, 2012), which is

something that was observed also in the three textbooks that will be analysed in this

16
thesis. The textbook authors also seem to prefer the most idiomatic phrasal verbs while

not recognizing the more transparent ones.

It is also common that various dictionaries of phrasal verbs list also prepositional and

phrasal-prepositional verbs, all under the heading of phrasal verbs. Biber et al. (1999),

Greenbaum (1996) and Manser (2017) can serve as examples of the aforementioned

approach. Although they provide the grammatical category of every particle, no

distinction at all is made between phrasal, prepositional and phrasal-prepositional verbs.

From the point of view adopted in this thesis, they would therefore be better referred to

as dictionaries of multi-word verbs.

The delimitation of phrasal verbs proposed in 1.1.1. might seem rather straightforward

at first sight. But as seen in the preceding paragraphs, the overlap between phrasal

verbs and the other categories of multi-word verbs tends to be rather substantial in some

cases. Bolinger (1971) states that being a phrasal verb is not purely a binary (yes/no)

issue but rather a “matter of degree” (p. 6). This already suggests that whatever criteria

for phrasal verb differentiation are used, there will always remain a trace of

arbitrariness. The two main problems when assessing whether a verb belongs to the

phrasal verb category are the prepositional verbs and the so-called free combinations.

Those issues will be dealt with in the following paragraphs.

1.2. Phrasal Verbs vs Prepositional Verbs

While it takes no substantial effort to differentiate phrasal-prepositional verbs,

prepositional verbs might seem quite similar to the previously introduced phrasal verbs

at first sight, as this group includes exemplars such as come across, get over or look for.

The main difference is that in the case of prepositional verbs, the particle following the

lexical verb functions as a preposition. Therefore, unlike phrasal verbs, prepositional

verbs require a nominal element following them which could be noun, pronoun or ing-

clause (Downing & Locke, 2006). Therefore, while both

(4a) I would like to go out.

17
 (4b) Me and my girlfriend have fallen out.
are totally acceptable,
(5a) *I just came across.
(5b)2 *My phone fell out.
would need a prepositional object to make them grammatical. Therefore, when the

object is omitted, prepositional verbs could be easily spotted because it makes the

sentence grammatically incorrect. Another important distinction is the ability of phrasal

verbs to move its object between the lexical verb and its particle. Prepositional verbs

generally keep their particle right before the object (Quirk et al., 1985). Compare:
(6a) She knocked down the argument.
(6b) She knocked the argument down.
(7a) He looks after three children.
*(7b) He looks three children after.
where (6a) and (6b) are instances of phrasal verbs and (7a) and (7b) examples

of prepositional verbs. The final distinction discussed here is the position of personal

pronoun as an object. In the case of phrasal verbs, the pronoun is located between the

lexical verb and its particle, while it has to follow the particle of prepositional verbs

(Downing & Locke, 2006). It is illustrated by the following pair of sentences, where

(8a) and (8b) belong to the phrasal verbs category and (9a) as well as (9b) fall under the

heading of prepositional verbs.

(8a) I need to look it up in a dictionary.
*(8b) I need to look up it in a dictionary.
(9a) He relies on him
*(9b) He relies him on.
Of course, the object omission is basically limited to intransitive, while the object and

pronoun movement to transitive phrasal verbs. What is generally regarded as almost the

exclusive phrasal verb feature (Quirk et al., 1985) is the stress pattern. Phrasal verbs

tend to have stress on their particle. In contract, stress in prepositional verbs falls on

their lexical verb. Similarly, phrasal verbs generally do not permit adverbial insertion

which can be applied to prepositional verbs (Bolinger, 1971). Darwin and Gray (1999)

later specified that this is mainly true when adverbs ending with –ly (e.g. nicely, quickly,

suddenly) are used. However, Darwin and Gray (1999) also pointed out that none of

2 Asterisk denotes a non-grammatical form

18
those tests is one hundred percent reliable. Therefore, there have been several attempts

to distinguish phrasal verbs from prepositional verbs objectively by means of various

rigorous sets of tests, which will be outlined in 1.4.

1.3. Phrasal Verbs vs Free Combinations

Most of the tests mentioned in the previous section can be used to not only distinguish

phrasal verbs from their prepositional counterparts, but also from the so-called

free combinations. Free combination, as the term already suggests, is a combination

of verb and adverb where they both have “separate grammatical and semantic status”

(Biber et al., 1999, p. 403). However, Downing and Locke (2006, p. 337) equate the

term with non-idiomatical phrasal verbs and thus do not treat them as distinct groups.

Free combinations can consist of a verb followed by either preposition or adverb (Biber

et al., 1999) but those constituents do not form a single unit. Distinguishing free

combinations from proper phrasal verbs is not always easy. Particularly because, as

Biber et al., 1999 admit, it is “hard to make an absolute distinction between free

combinations and fixed multi-word verbs” (p. 403) because not all phrasal verbs exhibit

the same degree of “fixedness”. Free combinations can be largely distinguished from

the phrasal verbs on the same grounds as previously described prepositional verbs.

However, as in the case or prepositional verbs, context is often essential in order to spot

the free combination. Consider the following examples taken from Biber et al. (1999, p.

40) which include both intransitive (10a) and transitive (11a) phrasal verb:
(10a) I would like to stay on and honour my contract.
(10b) Many dealers were content to stay on the sidelines.
(11a) He had put on his spectacles.
(11b) She put it carefully on the table.
Here, the sentences labelled with ‘a’ are examples of phrasal verbs, while the ‘b’

excerpts are instances of free combinations. Such constructions will not be accepted into

the subsequent analysis. Quirk et al. (1985) adopted a bit stricter standpoint that also

excludes expressions such as come in, drink up or go on. Those in some respects

19
borderline cases will be accepted in the analysis. More information about the actual

differentiation between phrasal verbs and free combinations 3 done in this thesis will be

provided in 4.3.

1.4. Phrasal Verbs Tests

It is obvious that phrasal and prepositional verbs (and free combinations, for that

matter) cannot be differentiated by sight. Some prepositional and phrasal verbs can even

have seemingly the same form (Quirk et al., 1985, p. 1151), such as in:
(12a) John fell down – adverbial construction
(12b) John fell down the hill – prepositional construction
Therefore, criteria for telling them apart based on various linguistic disciplines had to be

established. However, Claridge (2002) observed that “the most usual indicators or tests

for phrasal verbs unfortunately work with the transitive combinations alone” (p. 47) and

therefore, total reliability cannot be expected. This opinion is also shared by Darwin and

Gray (1999). Bolinger (1971) proposed nine possible tests 4. Apart from the already

discussed things that only phrasal verbs are generally capable of, such as pronoun

placement or object movement, they included also replacing by a single verb, stress

(which should fall on the particle in the case of phrasal and on the lexical verb in the

case of prepositional verbs) or listing. Darwin and Gray (1999) heavily criticized this

approach by maintaining that some tests (listing) are not tests at all and that some

(replacing by a single verb, adverbial insertion) would most likely be passed by some of

prepositional verbs and “almost any free combination” (p. 75).

Darwin and Gray (1999) went on to propose their own set of seven criteria (p. 77-81)

which are, generally speaking, specifications of the ones formulated by Bolinger (1971).

But also their new set of phrasal verbs test was criticised. Sawyer (2000) deemed it too

restrictive and objected that it removes some of the useful exemplars for language

teaching. This situation indicates that developing an extensive and rigorous set of

3 For their more thorough overview of free combinations, see the table on p. 1161
4 For the complete overview of them, see Bolinger (1971)

20
criteria may lead to a vicious circle of contradictions and that at least some degree of

intuition and deliberate choice is still required. Quirk et al. (1985, p. 1167) present their

own set of seven tests which almost precisely covers the features described in 1.3. and

1.4. However, they admit that although several criteria for determining whether a verb is

a phrasal verb might be in place, “it is best to think of the boundaries of multi-word

verbs categories as a scale (p. 1165)”. Therefore, there is a need for an overview what

will the term “phrasal verb” represent in the analysis and what verbs will (or will not)

be included. This overview will be provided in 4.3. What follows now is a chapter on

corpora, which are essential for this thesis as the previously described phrasal verbs are

going to be examined with respect to the corpora data.

2. Corpora
After establishing the term “phrasal verbs”, it should be stressed that, in this thesis, they

will not be studied in isolation, or abstracted from their natural use. The analysis will

make use of both authentic data illustrating language use as well as of English

21
textbooks. For the purposes of this chapter, the former component will be discussed in

the following paragraphs in more detail. The arguably best means of providing authentic

data are corpora. Influence of corpora has grown over the years, as they are now used

not only in linguistic research, but also in studies concerning teaching and learning of

languages (Lüdeling & Kytö, 2008). Interestingly, although corpora have become one of

the most important tools in many fields of study, it is not uncommon for even English as

a foreign language (EFL) teachers to be unaware of the term. For example, Belkhir

(2013) randomly selected ten EFL teachers in Algeria 5 and found out that nine of them

were not familiar with corpora and possibilities of their use in a language classroom.

The following chapter will not only state the definition of corpora, but also provide an

overview of the various types of corpora available and mention their basic

characteristics and use. Most attention will be devoted to the most relevant corpus for

the subsequent analysis – the British National Corpus. In addition, the features of

Sketch Engine, which is a piece of software used for interpreting the corpus data, will be

outlined.

2.1. Definition and Main Features

Unlike the one of phrasal verbs, the definition of corpora is relatively unambiguous

in both its formulation and application. The term corpus usually refers to “a collection

of authentic language, either written or spoken, which has been compiled for a

particular purpose” (Flowerdew, 2012, p. 3). The word “authentic” needs to be pointed

out, as it means that the texts included in corpus were produced in real situations rather

than constructed for a given purpose. It follows from the previously formulated

definition that it is relatively easy for anyone to construct his or her very own corpus.
5 This sample might not seem too convincing. Out of curiosity, the author of this thesis asked teachers
from two secondary schools (Gymnázium) in Hradec Králové, Czech Republic whether they know what
the term “language corpus” stands for and obtained eight responses. Four of the teachers were unfamiliar
with the term, while other two were made aware of it only very recently thanks to a dedicated workshop.
Although a large-scale analysis might provide different results, it is suggested that the term might not be
totally universally understood.

22
For example, if someone wants to study classroom discourse, s/he might record a

certain amount of school lessons and thus compile a written corpus of classroom

discourse. Similarly, if the aim is to examine language patterns used in detective stories

for example, one might compile all the stories containing the characters Hercule Poirot

and Sherlock Holmes and end up with a written “detectives’” corpus.

While it is theoretically possible to build a corpus in such a straightforward way and

there exists thousands of private corpora (Lüdeling & Kytö, 2008), the research results

can be “only as good as the corpus” (Sinclair, 1991, p. 9). O’Keeffe, McCarthy and

Carter (2007) also underline the need for representativeness, which should be the key

thing to consider when building a corpus. They remarked that the “design stage” is

essential for achieving it (p. 2). What might help to accomplish this representativeness

could be building the given corpus “according to explicit design criteria” (Flowerdew,

2012, p. 3). However, explicit criteria do not guarantee representativeness on their own.

For example, if the only criterion of a corpus is recording ten totally randomly selected

people and then shortening their performances to one minute for consistency, such

corpus is built according to explicit criteria, but is hardly representative with respect to

the whole population. Therefore, it should be assured that the criteria are composed with

attention to as many details as possible. Thankfully, a great amount of corpora that have

been constructed with thorough and carefully built criteria in mind and some of them

will be dealt with in the next chapter. Before this will be done, the most common

operations that are usually done using corpora will be introduced.

It has now become a standard that corpora are available in digital and machine-readable

form (Flowerdew, 2012). This allows for a very quick processing of the enormous

amounts of data that are incorporated in the corpora. It is often the case that parts

of speech and the source texts or recordings are tagged which allows for even deeper

23
study of data. One of the vitally important corpus tools is concordancing, which is

“using corpus software to find every occurrence of a particular word or phrase”

(O’Keeffe et al., 2007, p. 8). The word that is the concordance subject is called node

(O’Keeffe et al., 2007). Results of a concordance, which are called concordance lines,

are often displayed in the so-called Key Word in Context (KWIC) format (O’Keeffe et

al., 2007) with the node in the middle, surrounded by a couple of words on both sides.

When the lines are read horizontally, the studied patterns can be observed rather

quickly.

Concordance results, when combined with other corpus tools, allow for further

exploration of the data. They prove to be particularly useful for providing frequency

data, and specifically frequency lists (Sinclair, 1991). Those lists can provide 6 a very

clear overview of (among others) various collocational and phraseological patterns,

including idioms and a number of lexical chunks (such as I don´t know, have a look and

so on) (O’Keeffe et al., 2007, Flowerdew, 2012). It should be noted that the previously

introduced phrasal verbs also belong to this category. Studies that deal with the

constructions described above and use corpora will be presented in the third chapter and

it will be shown that frequency lists are by far the most exploited way of corpora use.

As indicated above, corpora can have many forms. They can be either spoken or written

(or both), general or more specialized, small or large. One of the largest corpora are the

so-called national corpora, which are supposed to encompass as many aspects of

a country’s national language as they can (Lüdeling & Kytö, 2008).

Lüdeling & Kytö (2008) also pointed out that although “an ideal national corpus should

cover proportionally both written and spoken language” (p. 383), such corpora tend

to include only or primarily written data as spoken data are substantially more

complicated and expensive to gather. As far as corpus size is concerned, linguists

6 More details about those processes can be found in FCTC (2007, p. 11-16).

24
generally agree that the bigger corpus, the better (Flowerdew, 2012). Sinclair (1991)

claimed that corpus should contain at least a million words (but preferably many

millions), which makes him more likely to provide a sufficing representation of a

language.

However, size of a corpus is highly dependent on the phenomenon one wants to study.

Smaller corpora might suffice if rather frequent forms (such as grammatical items) are

studied (McEnery and Wilson (2001), as cited in Flowerdew, 2012, p. 4). Flowerdew

(2012) also stated that the biggest corpora with more general purposes tend to contain

between 100 and 500 million words, whereas smaller and specialized corpora usually

have from 50 to 250 thousand words. The following chapter will predominantly focus

on the bigger, general-purpose ones and provide a selection of the currently available

corpora.

2.2. Available Corpora

This section will examine the more prominent corpora that have been created over the

years. It will by no means provide an exhaustive list of them, but rather concentrate

on the ones relevant for the research overview presented in the following chapter and

for the analysis itself. This section will begin with supplying more detail about the

British National Corpus, as it will be used (both directly and indirectly) in the analysis.

2.2.1. British National Corpus

The British National Corpus (BNC) belongs, as its name suggests, to the domain of the

national corpora, which are supposed to encompass as many aspects of a country’s

national language as they can (Lüdeling & Kytö, 2008). The BNC was completed

between years 1991 and 1994 and its main goal is to provide as comprehensive

coverage of modern British English as possible (Lee, 2010). For a long time, it has also

been regarded as “the gold standard for British English” (Thomas, 2016, p. 11). It

25
includes approximately 100 million words, which makes it one of the so-called “mega-

corpora” (Lee, 2010). These words belong to both spoken and written registers; the

written part makes up for approximately 90% of the corpus, while the spoken domain

covers the remaining 10%. The corpus includes text and transcribed recordings cover

the time period from the early 1960s to 1993 (Lüdeling & Kytö, 2008). As indicated by

Lee (2010), the spoken part consists mainly of transcribed conversations recorded by a

substantial number of people.

What makes the BNC tempting to use is the feature called part of speech tagging 7,

which is used for the whole corpus (Liu, 2011). Apart from this, also text types 8 are

distinguished. Written text were selected based on domain, time and medium while the

spoken part was assembled on the grounds of demographic and context-governed

criteria (Lüdeling & Kytö, 2008). However, this system was later expanded by David

Lee (2001), who created the so-called David Lee’s Classification of text types, which is

“generally found to be more useful than the original system” (Thomas, 2016, p. 41). In

total, 70 text types are distinguished, where 46 of them are written registers (such as

academic prose, essays, letters, newspapers or novels) and 24 belong to the spoken

domains (e. g. TV or radio broadcasts, conversations, lectures, or speech). According to

Lee (2010), this classification is one of the aspects that makes the BNC very interesting

for research projects and was one of the primary reasons for choosing it in this thesis as

well.

After providing the basic information about the BNC, the next part of this chapter will

introduce another three corpora that will be later also mentioned in the third chapter

when dealing with the overview of available research.

2.2.2. Other corpora

7 It means that every word is tagged according to its part of speech (noun, verb, adjective, …)
8 For a detailed breakdown of these categories, see (Lüdeling & Kytö, 2008, p. 384-385).

26
The BNC introduced in the preceding paragraphs can be seen as a pioneer of national

corpora, which was followed by other similar projects. Presently, there is a plethora

of national corpora and this group does not only include English varieties, but also

Czech, Polish and Hebrew to name a few (Lee, 2010). A similar project is the freely

available9 Corpus of Contemporary American English. (COCA), which focuses on

providing a balanced overview of the current patterns of American English. Therefore, it

includes samples from various genres such as “speech, fiction, popular magazines,

newspapers and academic texts” (Lee, 2010, p.110). However, the spoken component is

primarily made up of broadcast interviews and various shows, which means that

“informal conversation is one area that is lacking” (Lee, 2010, p.110). According to

Davies (2008), it is “the largest freely available corpus of American English”. It can be

said that the data collection for COCA basically started where the BNC ended (Liu,

2011) and it thus covers the years from 1994 onwards. Unlike the BNC, it is regularly

updated and at the time of writing (March 2018), in includes over 560 million words

(Davies, 2008).

Another big corpora project was Collins Birmingham University International

Language Database (COBUILD), which was created mainly with dictionary makers and

grammarians in mind (O’Keeffe et al., 2007). It was assembled already in 1990

(O’Keeffe et al., 2007) and, as its website 10 states, it contains an enormous sum of 4.5

billion words. COBUILD also has both spoken (everyday conversations, radio and TV

material) and written (books, newspapers, magazines and websites) data, which are

updated once in a month (“The Collins Corpus”, n. d.). The corpus has already served as

a starting point for production of more than 15 dictionaries and grammars and thanks to

the success of this project, it has by now become common that dictionaries and

9 The free COCA interface is available on the following website: https://corpus.byu.edu/coca/

10 https://collins.co.uk/pages/elt-cobuild-reference-the-collins-corpus

27
grammar guides are corpus-based (O’Keeffe et al., 2007). The Bank of English, which

can be seen as continuation of the COBUILD corpus (Lee, 2010), has become an

everyday tool for lexicographers in their research (“The Collins Corpus”, n. d.).

The more generally built corpora described above are of course not the only corpora

types available. As mentioned before, corpora can now play an important role in second

language teaching and learning research. In this field, corpora assembled from English

language teaching textbooks can be of a special importance. One of such corpora is the

Textbook Material (TeMa) corpus. According to its website11, it was built from 32

English for General Purposes textbooks at the advanced or intermediate level and

includes approximately 724 thousand words. It was built for a specific research project

on phraseology and language learning (“The TeMa corpus: brief description”, n. d.).

Each of the textbook series was then further split into eight subcorpora on the basis of

textbook series, volume (student’s book or workbook) and exercise type (texts,

tapescripts, vocabulary exercises and exercise guidelines) (“The TeMa corpus: brief

description”, n. d.). Corpora like TeMa can then provide a valuable insight into the

language patterns presented in textbooks and allow for a quick comparison with the

“mega-corpora” such as the BNC or COBUILD.

Apart from the corpora mentioned above, there is of course a great number of other

categories of corpora (e.g. learner, parallel or multimodal corpora) and also more

exemplars belonging to the aforementioned categories that might prove fruitful to deal

with. However, as they are not directly relevant for the analysis to come, they will not

be discussed in this thesis. What follows instead is a description of the piece of software

that will be used in one of the analysis stages.

2.3. Sketch Engine

11 https://uclouvain.be/en/research-institutes/ilc/cecl/tema.html

28
While it is good to have a clear idea about the available corpora, it is even more

essential to know how to browse and gather the data extracted from them. Some (e.g.

COCA) have a built-in search interface that allows for basic concordancing and related

tasks, while some of them (such as CANCODE12) are not freely available at all.

Although there exist “at least three public web interfaces to the BNC” (Lee, 2010, p.

110), second part of this thesis’s analysis will make use of Sketch Engine. It is a corpus

query tool that is also freely available13 for all students and staff members of Masaryk

University, as it has been in development in Brno since 2001 (Thomas, 2016).

Originally downloadable software, it is now a website which includes many corpora of

various kinds for approximately 60 languages (Thomas, 2016). Sketch Engine allows for

an elaborate exploration of corpora thanks to many tools that are incorporated in it.

Apart from concordancing and creating various lists as mentioned above, one of the

powerful Sketch Engine tools is the Word Sketch14. Word Sketch is “a one-page profile

of a word’s collocational behaviour” (Thomas, 2016, p. 13). It is presented in a table

which is sorted according to grammatical relations of a given word (such as modifiers,

objects and subjects, prepositional phrases, particles and many more). These tables can

provide “a stunning overview of a word’s paradigmatic and syntagmatic relations”

(Thomas, 2016, p. 13). The most relevant part of Word Sketch for this thesis is the

category of particles, which effectively lists all phrasal verbs formed from a given verb

and the particles listed in Word Sketch. The Word Sketch tool is available for most

corpora included in Sketch Engine and will be used in the previously outlined way in

one of the analysis stages.

12 Stands for Cambridge and Nottingham Corpus of Discourse in English – five million word spoken
only corpus containing various recordings; publications related to this corpus can be found here:
https://www.nottingham.ac.uk/research/groups/cral/projects/cancode.aspx
13 The login page of Sketch Engine for Masaryk University can be found under the following link:
https://ske.fi.muni.cz/
14 Word Sketch, as Thomas (2016) stated, is also the main reason why the software has been named
Sketch Engine

29
After providing the necessary theoretical background for the analysis, it is now time

to turn to research projects where the aforementioned terms and notions were exploited.

The following chapter will thus provide an overview of studies that used a corpus to

study phrasal verbs or similar constructions with respect to textbooks.

30
 3. Research Overview
As McCarten (2010, p. 415) states, corpora can influence textbooks intended for second

language acquisition in a number of ways. These include “vocabulary and grammar

syllabus, lexico-grammatical patterns or discourse management” (McCarten, 2010,

31
p. 416-418). Several studies dealing with the correspondence between corpus data and

typical English textbook content have already been published. This chapter will present

studies that are relevant for this thesis because they either dealt with phrasal verbs to

some extent or made use of the same reference corpus (BNC) as this thesis. From now

on, the abbreviation ELT will be used and will stand for English language teaching.

Koprowski (2005) examined lexical phrases such as kick the bucket or take a picture

in three contemporary textbooks (Innovations, Inside Out and New Headway Upper

Intermediate) using the COBUILD corpus. As this study was concerned with all multi-

word expressions, phrasal verbs were included as well. She found that there very few

expressions shared across all the three textbooks and that very prominent phrases were

missing. Furthermore, he constructed usefulness scores based on corpus saliency of the

expressions and discovered that the more frequent expressions in the textbooks were

rather scarce in the corpus. Another important finding was that the inclusion of the

expressions in the textbooks was largely topic-based and that the so-called utility 15 of

the expressions was most likely not taken into account.

Gouverneur (2008) took a similar set of three textbooks (Cutting Edge, Inside Out and

New Headway) and analysed the phraseological patterns of make and take with respect

to the TeMa corpus. Therefore, various collocations as well as phrasal verbs were also

considered. She took intermediate and advanced levels of all the three textbooks

into account and realized that the general patterns mostly resembled the ones found in

the corpus and that their presentation was more or less consistent across the textbooks

of the same levels. However, comparison between levels has yielded “puzzling results”

(Gouverneur, 2008, p. 241). It was indicated that the more proficient learners were

neglected, as much fewer such expressions were included in the advanced level

15 This utility corresponds to the usefulness score which is an average on the expression frequencies per
million words in five sub corpora

32
textbook. Therefore, Gouverneur (2008) remarked that it is not wise to take for granted

that those expressions are problematic only for less experienced learners of English.

Furthermore, the number of shared collocations was determined to be surprisingly low.

The author also examined functions of the studied expressions in textbook exercises by

determining whether they were the exercise focus. They were split into three main

categories – direct focus, indirect focus and no focus. Although the number of

vocabulary exercises that explicitly practised patterns of make and take was high at the

intermediate level, it was substantially lower in the advanced textbooks, as mentioned

above. A similarly structured overview of the use of phrasal verbs will be presented in

the final part of this thesis’s analysis.

The following two research studies used the BNC corpus. Gabrielatos (2006) carried out

a study that was concerned with the comparison of if-conditionals in a random sample

of 1000 if-sentences from the BNC and eleven advanced16 ELT textbooks. Results of the

analysis proved to be mixed. Although basic types of the conditionals were presented in

every book, their distinction was found to be debatable. For example, according to the

author, the difference between zero and first conditionals has nothing to do with

modality. Gabrielatos (2006) thus suggests connecting them into one category.

Furthermore, she found out that the so-called mixed conditionals were extremely rare in

the corpus sample, which suggests that this category, which is frequently introduced in

textbooks, might be obsolete. Perhaps the most interesting finding is that if all the

textbook types of conditionals were joined into one category, this category would cover

only 44% occurrences of if-clauses in the BNC sample. This led the author to claim that

the ELT typology is “potentially misleading and restricting” (Gabrielatos, 2006, p. 16).

Römer (2004) examined ten central modal verbs in two textbooks used in German

elementary schools. Only grammar points of explicit inclusion of at least one modal

16 Level B2 or higher

33
were studied. Once again, several discrepancies were discovered. Some of the modals

were rather overused, while would was found to be significantly underused. Distribution

of meanings in the textbooks was also determined to be inconsistent with the corpus

data with especially can or could expressing ability being highly prioritised in the

textbooks, while may as a possibility was neglected. Furthermore, modal negation was

much higher in textbooks than in the corpus, but some modals were not negated at all.

Also the range of modals used in if-clauses was comparably very low in the textbooks.

As this thesis is centred on phrasal verbs, studies dealing directly with them will be of

the highest importance. Phrasal verbs have been frequently studied in non-corpus or

general corpus based research, but studies including materials intended for teaching

English, such as textbooks, are quite rare (Zafiri & Mukundan, 2013).

Oliveira and Avezedo (2012) analysed all the multi-word verb categories (phrasal verbs,

prepositional verbs and phrasal-prepositional verbs) as found in seven textbooks

recommended for high school teaching of English in Brazil. They were mainly

concerned with the terminology of multi-word verbs and the way how they are

presented in the course books. The main conclusion was that the approach towards

terminology is unsatisfactory as the books tend to equate phrasal verbs to multi-word

verbs and the students are left “with superficial and somehow inaccurate information

concerning the language topic” (Oliveira & Avezedo, 2012, p. 14). However, these

results were in line with a questionnaire survey they administrated as also 98% of

respondents (34 both public and private secondary school teachers) do not consider the

multi-word verbs distinctions to be important.

The previous study made no use of corpora, unlike the one done by Zafiri and

Mukundan (2013). They examined the phrasal verbs patterns in five Malaysian

secondary school textbooks with BNC being the reference corpus. They gathered a

34
corpus based on data extracted from the textbooks and all instances of phrasal verbs

were included in the analysis. Surprisingly, they found out that the number of phrasal

verbs noted was more or less indirectly proportional to the textbook level. The authors

also observed that many of the phrasal verbs (such as fill in, sound out, write down)

were used mainly to give instructions and thus without any learning purpose. What they

found concerning is the very low amount of repetition, as most of the phrasal verbs they

found tended to have a rather low number of hits. Like Koprowski (2005), also Zafiri

and Mukundan (2013) remarked that the selection of phrasal verbs tends to be primarily

topic-based without taking other objective criteria (such as frequency counts) into

account. However, they added that this is not necessarily a negative thing as the

thematic focus can also have pedagogical benefits. On the positive side, many phrasal

verbs were found to be shared across many (often all) of the five studied textbooks.

But the two most important studies for the rest of this thesis are the following ones.

Gardner and Davies (2007) have created a list of the most frequent phrasal verbs in the

BNC. They relied on the system of tagging incorporated in the BNC and decided

to include all two-part verbs which consist of a lexical verb and an adverbial particle

(both with their corresponding tags). Particles both adjacent to their lexical verbs and

separated by one or two words from them were permitted. Gardner and Davies (2007)

claim that by focusing solely on frequency, they can eliminate intuition and bring

objectivity into design of teaching materials (p. 342). The main output of their work was

producing a list of the 100 most frequent phrasal verbs in the BNC. However, only

combinations including the most common twenty lexical verbs were included, thus

possibly eliminating some very frequent phrasal verbs.

Liu (2011) expanded the work done by Gardner and Davies (2007). He used their data

and assumptions as a starting point and used two corpora – BNC and COCA – to

35
establish a list of the most frequent phrasal verbs. Liu used a four-stage procedure 17

for identification of the phrasal verbs and wanted “to ensure a meaningful comparison”

(Liu, 2011, p. 665) with the work done by Gardner and Davies (2007). Eventually, he

created two separate lists (one for each corpus) of 150 most frequent phrasal verbs.

This number already accounts for 62.95% of all occurrences of phrasal verbs in the

BNC (Liu, 2011), while the top one hundred used by Gardner and Davies (2011)

contains 51.4% of phrasal verbs found in the BNC. Various registers (e.g. spoken or

written) were also taken into account, albeit only in COCA. Both the analyses by

Gardner and Davies (2007) and Liu (2011) adopted the same approach towards the

inclusion of phrasal verbs (by permitting all verb + adverbial particle combinations) as

this thesis will do. Therefore, their results are directly comparable and will be further

used in the analysis. More information will be provided in the following chapter, which

will also provide more details about the process.

All of the previously described analyses were primarily concerned with frequency

counts, as they are a very useful guide in building a syllabus (McCarten, 2010). Both

the studies done by Liu (2011) and Gardner and Davies (2007) admit that focusing

purely on frequency might prove too narrow, especially in the case of such a productive

phenomenon of phrasal verbs. Most notably, the studies do not take the various meaning

senses into account. Garnier and Schmitt (2015) wanted to rectify this limitation

by creating the Phrasal Verb Pedagogical List18 (PHaVE list) of the 150 most frequent

phrasal verbs in COCA including the overview of their prevalent meaning senses.

17 The four stages were the following:

1. searching for all phrasal verb tokens of a lexical lemma
2. searching for the tokens of transitive phrasal verbs used with their particle separated by one intervening
word
3. searching for the tokens of separable phrasal verbs with two intervening words
4. tabulation of the gained results by means of an Excel table
Detailed description of this process is found in Liu (2011, p. 665-666).
18 The complete list is freely available under the following link:
https://drive.google.com/drive/u/0/folders/0B7FW2BYaBgeiMkphZXFOM2V2bTA

36
The author claims that this list covers over 75% of occurrences of phrasal verbs in the

COCA corpus. All the three aforementioned lists can be enormously helpful

for practitioners, as their focus on the most common phrasal verbs offer a clear guidance

for their selection into teaching materials (Garnier & Schmitt, 2015).

Although there is not a great number of studies dealing with comparisons of textbook

patterns of phrasal verbs and the corresponding corpus data, the aforementioned ones

have all shown rather substantial discrepancies between results of their research and the

actual occurrences of phrasal verbs in ELT materials. Koprowski (2005) found out that

there was no phrasal verb that would be shared across all of her three studied textbooks.

Furthermore, Zafiri and Mukundan (2013) concluded that “both the selection and

presentation of phrasal verbs are inconsistent with their actual use in the BNC” (p.

1821). Oliveira and Azevedo (2012) remarked that “the textbooks fail in basic

definitions” (p. 15) of multi-word verbs. All in all, virtually every single one of the

previously mentioned studies discovered rather substantial inconsistencies. Although

each of the studies was majorly based on different textbooks and also corpora to some

extent, it might still be useful to keep this trend in mind throughout the remainder of this

thesis.

The aforementioned research studies have shown that it is possible to examine the

patterns of various constructions, such as phrasal verbs, in a number of different ways.

Some, such as Zafiri and Mukundan (2013) decided to focus solely of frequency. Others

tried to also take other criteria into account, either by measuring utility of each

expression (Koprowski, 2005) or by examining their role in textbook exercises

(Gouverneur, 2008). Also a variety of corpora have been used – BNC, COBUILD, or

TeMa being some of the examples listed here. However, most of the studies included

one or two layers of analysis. This thesis will add a third layer by considering also the

37
types of texts where the most frequent phrasal verbs occur both in the corpus and the

textbooks. The other two layers will be inspired by the frequency lists proposed by Liu

(2011) and Gardner and Davies (2007) and the division according to exercise focus

offered by Governeur (2008). The following chapter will provide more details about this

process.

38
 4. Methodology
The following paragraphs will set the stage for the last part of this thesis that will

provide an analysis of phrasal verbs content in three contemporary English textbooks.

The main aim of the analysis will be to study the patterns of use of phrasal verbs in the

39
textbooks and compare them to the data gained from the BNC. The analysis will be

partly based on corpus data as well as on the studies carried out by Liu (2011) and

Gardner and Davies (2007). In the following sections, the methods and processes that

were used for the subsequent analysis will be introduced and described. Altogether, this

part of the thesis will specify how this thesis is going to answer its three main research

questions, which are essentially specifications of the main aim that was stated above.

The three research questions are listed below.

(Q1) What are the most frequent phrasal verbs in the textbooks compared to the

BNC?

(Q2) In what types of texts and spoken interactions are phrasal verbs used in the

textbooks compared to the BNC?

(Q3) In which ways are phrasal verbs used in the textbooks?

After formulating the aim and research questions of this thesis’s analysis, it is now time

to turn to the reference corpus, textbooks and the process of the phrasal verbs selection

that are going to be used will be introduced. The aforementioned aspects will now in

turn be presented in the following paragraphs.

4.1. The Reference Corpus

The reference corpus for the analysis will be the BNC that was introduced in 2.2.1.

It could have also proven fruitful to select other corpus such as COCA, but the BNC was

chosen based on two primary considerations. First, it offers a comprehensive view of

the British variety of English and is thus better comparable to the textbooks that are all

British as well. And secondly, thanks to the classification of texts and audio materials

provided by David Lee (2001), it has a great tool that allows a detailed breakdown of

various both spoken and written registers. For example, although Liu (2011) was also

concerned with comparison of registers in his COCA analysis, there are only five genres

40
distinguished by the COCA interface. In contrast, the David Lee´s Classification

available in the BNC enables selection from seventy different categories of registers.

The analysis carried out in this thesis will make use of the so-called BNC World Edition,

which includes corrections of text type and parts of speech tags as well as the

introduction of the David Lee’s Classification (O’Keeffe et al., 2007). The version that

is going to be used is labelled bnc2 (main) in Sketch Engine and contains 96,048,950

words.

4.2. The Analysed Textbooks

As in some of the previously mentioned studies, three widely used textbooks were

chosen for the analysis. They include Insight, Maturita Solutions and New Headway 4th

Edition. The analysis will only be concerned with student’s books and take the

intermediate level volumes19 into account as that is the most relevant level for the

secondary school environment. Maturita Solutions contains several pages that offer

sample B2 exam exercises, which indicates that the B2 level according to the Common

Reference Framework of Reference for Languages20 (CEFR) is the target of the

textbooks. Maturita Solutions and New Headway ranked as the first and third most

frequently used English course book in the school year 2016/2017 in a questionnaire

survey administered by Sládková (2017). Insight was not included in this survey but

was chosen because of its availability and the author’s personal experience. This survey

was sent to 518 secondary schools in all regions of the Czech Republic (Sládková,

2017). Furthermore, it has been assured that distribution of secondary school types (e.g.

gymnázium, střední odborná škola) remained equal (Sládková, 2017). However,

responses came from only 70 institutions, thus making barely 13.5% of the originally

19 The precise names of these volumes are Insight Intermediate, New Headway Intermediate and
Maturita Solutions Intermediate
20 More information about the CEFR levels can be found for example under the following link:
https://www.coe.int/en/web/common-european-framework-reference-languages/level-descriptions

41
approached amount of high schools (Sládková, 2017). Therefore, the survey results

should be taken with a certain level of discretion, but the trends might still be interesting

to observe.

All the three previously mentioned textbooks were published by Oxford University

Press but the differences between them are substantial enough that they allow for

inclusion of all the three books in the analysis. Each of them also possesses the

accreditation of Czech Ministry of Education, Youth and Sports which enables them to

be used in Czech secondary schools. The following sections will provide a brief account

of each of those textbooks. All the factual information was taken from the textbooks

themselves and it was inspired by the comments on syllabus classification by Nunan

(2001). As this thesis focuses on phrasal verbs, the role of grammar and lexis (and thus

structural features or structural syllabus) in the textbooks will be of main importance.

4.2.1. Maturita Solutions

Maturita Solutions is, according to Sládková´s (2017) survey, by far the most used

textbook in Czech secondary schools. Its Intermediate volume was used 38 times out of

76 responses in the penultimate year of studies and in 36 cases out of 78 in the final

year. So around half of the Czech secondary schools included in the survey is making

use of this book. This analysis will study the first edition of this textbook which was

published in 2008, making it one of the newer textbook series on the market. What

makes it particularly interesting for Czech teachers and students is the inclusion of

English-Czech wordlist on Student’s MultiROM and sections dedicated specifically to

Czech maturita exam preparation in the Workbook. Maturita Solutions uses the skill-

based syllabus and is split into ten topic-based units which are further divided into eight

parts based on their focus – Vocabulary and Listening, Grammar, Culture, Grammar,

Reading, Everyday English and Writing. Each such part should correspond to one

42
classroom lesson. As the units evolve around a given topic, the need for context is

stressed. It is established by a set of vocabulary together with listening and other

activities.

Each lesson has two main grammar points, but the textbook is not primarily sequenced

according to them. All in all, the textbook aims to develop all four skills by means of

various interactive tasks that are clearly set into a context and have a clear outcome.

Therefore, it would be difficult to pinpoint one particular syllabus type, as components

of many of them are present in the textbook. For the purposes of this thesis, the most

essential finding will be that the structural aspects are not dominant 21. The book also

contains fourteen pages devoted to B2 exam practice as well as reviews and skills

round-ups after every two units. In addition, grammar and vocabulary builders for each

lesson are attached at the end of the textbook.

4.2.2. New Headway 4th edition

The Headway textbooks have been traditionally popular among Czech teachers, which

is confirmed by the fact that they were vastly represented in Sládková´s (2017) survey.

In the questionnaire responses, it was recorded as being the third most frequently

employed textbook in both of the final secondary school years. The thesis will deal with

the fourth edition of this textbook which was published in 2009. The Student’s book

of New Headway contains its traditional number of twelve units as well as many

supplementary materials. These include writing exercises for each unit, tape scripts of

all the listening exercises, grammar references and word list corresponding to the units

they were taught in, grammatical verb patterns together with a list of irregular verbs and

several more extra materials to be used in class. Every unit is clearly structured

according to the grammar points, which fluently connect to the ones presented in the

21 However, the grammar and vocabulary builders located at the end of the textbook are rather
structurally focused

43
next units. Also vocabulary is systematically presented, which means that New

Headway might serve as a good example of the structural syllabus. Functions are

integrated into both grammar and vocabulary and all these aspects should together

develop the four language skills.

4.2.3. Insight

Insight was published in 2013 which makes it the newest out of the three selected

textbooks. To date (April 2018), no more editions were published. Its young age is

probably the primary reason why Insight does not appear in the survey conducted

by Sládková (2017) at all. However, in the author’s own experience, it is a book which

is successfully used by a significant amount of secondary schools. Insight is also built

around skill based syllabus and contains ten units. They are divided into five parts 22 –

Reading and vocabulary, Grammar and listening, Listening, speaking and vocabulary,

Culture, vocabulary and grammar and Writing.

Each unit is followed by a two-page vocabulary review and after every even lesson,

a cumulative review of all things covered previously is provided. After the final

cumulative review, ten more pages containing vocabulary banks are included. Every

lesson is centred on the language skill, which are all explicitly anchored in the syllabus.

It also includes strategies of how to approach various tasks (especially in the case

of listening, reading and writing). Furthermore, the sequence of grammatical points is

also rather clear, which indicates that Insight integrates the skill-based syllabus with the

features of the structural one.

4.3. Selection of Phrasal Verbs for the Analysis

The aforementioned textbooks were then used for the selection of phrasal verbs, whose

occurrences will serve as the material for the analysis. The verbs were manually

extracted from the textbooks according to the procedure described below. The term

22 Beginning of each part is indicated by a capital letter

44
“phrasal verb” will be used in line with the definition introduced in 1.1.1., which is

compatible with the definitions formulated by Gardner and Davies (2007) or Liu (2011),

thus admitting all combinations of a lexical verb and an adverbial particle. All of the

three student’s books were studied as a whole, unit by unit. All exercises were taken into

account, including each listening exercise and, in the case of Insight, also materials

found on the accompanying DVD. All reviews, skill round-ups, vocabulary and

grammar builders, exam preparation exercises as well as extra writing or speaking

materials were taken into account. On the other hand, the following textbook items were

excluded from the analysis: dictionary entries (with the exception of cases where the

lemma itself was a phrasal verb, then the lemma was included), lists of irregular verbs,

word lists, grammar references, syllabus and all notes related to the syllabus or textbook

content. However, it is highly debatable whether those parts of the textbook would

contain any phrasal verbs at all. When a recording was subsequently transcribed in a

textbook, the phrasal verb (or verbs) found in the recording were counted only once,

unless the transcription served for the purposes of a different exercise.

After mentioning where the phrasal verbs were looked for, it will now be discussed how

they were identified and what were the subsequent criteria for their inclusion in the

analysis. Although some definitions include the idiomacity of phrasal verbs, this thesis

will take both fully opaque (such as turn up = appear) and fully literal (give away) types

of phrasal verbs into account. In the author’s opinion, determining the degree

of idiomacity of phrasal verbs would bring a subjective criterion into the selection

process as the categories of phrasal verb senses tend to be rather fuzzy. This standpoint

was also adopted by researchers mentioned in the third chapter of this thesis. Claridge

(2002) claims that “idiomacity, after all, does not emerge out of nowhere, but is based in

some way or other on the regular patterns of the language (p. 47)”, thus supporting this

45
approach. It is also more in line with the aims of this thesis to give an overall picture

of impact of phrasal verbs on textbook materials rather than focus solely on the more

idiomatic examples.

In order to distinguish phrasal verbs from the other types of multi-word verbs or free

combinations, a selection of tests was used. First and foremost, it was checked whether

there are one or two particles following the phrasal verb candidate. If two were found,

the verb was automatically discarded from the analysis, thus eliminating all possible

phrasal-prepositional verbs. The second step was to rule out prepositional verbs and free

combinations. To do this, a selection of tests was performed according to the given

phrasal verb’s transitivity. As far as intransitive verbs are concerned, the object omission

and adverbial insertion tests were done in order to label the verbs accordingly and rule

out prepositional verbs. In the case of transitive verbs, tests of object movement

and pronoun placement were carried out. The aforementioned tests, which were all

outlined in the preceding sections, proved sufficient to rule out basically all

unsatisfactory combinations. However, it should be remarked that some of the tests, and

especially the last one, might prove a bit ambiguous as “some people are more willing

to accept adverbial insertion in certain instances than others” (Darwin and Gray, 1999,

p. 80). Therefore, two dictionaries that will be introduced at the end of this section were

used as the final measure.

What remains is to comment on some possible leftover free combinations. The author

adopted the more lenient and inclusive approach by including also constructions such as

come back or go down in their literal senses, although some of them would not satisfy

one of the criteria presented by (Quirk et al., 1985). However, this less strict approach is

by no means a non-standard one in both general linguistic and more pedagogically

aimed research. Most of the studies mentioned in the third chapter adopted a similar

46
attitude towards phrasal verb delimitation, most notably the work done by Gardner and

Davies (2007) that will be further used in the analysis

Of course, there were both many clear-cut cases and also some less apparent ones

among the phrasal verbs found in the textbooks. Those that were more uncertain were

then further confirmed by consulting two dictionaries dedicated to phrasal verbs. These

were Oxford Phrasal Verb Dictionary for Language Learners (2006) and Useful

Dictionary of Phrasal Verbs that was created by Martin Manser (2017). The

aforementioned two publications were also used when in doubt during final decision

making and their classification of the particles was preferred in such cases. If a phrasal

verb candidate was not included in either of them under the corresponding sense and

simultaneously showed signs of being a free combination, it was subsequently removed

from the analysis.

It has also been decided not to include nominalized forms of phrasal verbs (such as in

“The try outs for the team were successful”) and expressions that tend to form a single

syntactic unit as a whole (such as make up one’s mind). On the other hand, all gerunds

were included as it is often difficult to maintain whether their nominal or verbal

characteristics are prevalent. All phrasal verbs were then lemmatized to provide a

clearer picture of the data. This means that go on, going on and went on were all

classified as go on. Liu (2011) sees this as a possible limitation, but without the

lemmatization, it could prove difficult to find a considerable amount of the same phrasal

verbs’ forms in the textbooks.

To conclude the description of the selection process, it should be noted that, based on

the definition of phrasal verbs introduced in 1.1.1., there is not a complete overlap

between the phrasal verb terminology adopted here and in the textbooks. Some

textbooks exercises contain expressions that are referred to as phrasal verbs, but not all

47
of them are completely in line with the definition used in this thesis and such exemplars

are not included in the following analysis. A good is example of this is the exercise six

on page 29 in Maturita Solutions. Students are asked to match five phrasal verbs – find

out, carry out, look after, get on with, work out – with their definitions. Although all

five of them are labelled as phrasal verbs by the textbook, only three – find out, carry

out and work out – meet the previously mentioned criteria for being phrasal verbs and

thus being included in the analysis. The rest is understood as belonging to the category

of either prepositional (look after) or phrasal-prepositional (get on with) verbs in this

thesis. However, prepositional, phrasal-prepositional and other possible multi-word verb

combinations apart from phrasal verbs will not be considered in the analysis.

4.4. The Analysis Process

After providing the basic information about the gained sample of phrasal verbs from the

textbooks, the subsequent analysis will be done in three stages, where each one

corresponds to one of the research questions outlined above. The first two parts of the

analysis will use corpus data, which will be compared to the phrasal verbs patterns

found in the three aforementioned textbooks. The textbooks will be compared both

individually and collectively to the BNC data. The third part will be solely concerned

with the individual textbook comparison. The analysis will make use of tables

presenting the data and accompanying comments. For the sake of consistency, all values

in the tables containing non-integer numbers will be rounded to two decimal places 23.

All three stages will be divided into three sections, one for each textbook. Although the

cross-textbook comparison is not the main focus of the analysis, such layout will

inevitably lead to some comparisons of the textbooks as well. More detailed description

of the three analysis stages is provided below.

23 With one exception that will be explicitly stated

48
 4.4.1. First stage

The first analysis stage will be concentrated on comparing the frequency counts of

phrasal verbs in the BNC and the textbooks, which is represented by the research

question (Q1). The first part of the analysis will be based on the main outputs of the

studies carried out by Gardner and Davies (2007 and Liu (2011). The main focus will be

frequencies of the phrasal verbs identified in the textbooks. The verbs were grouped

together according to the procedure outlined in 4.3. and count for each phrasal verb was

determined. Afterwards, a list sorted according to the counts was developed for every

textbook. In the first part of the analysis, these lists will be confronted with the list 24

compiled by Liu (2011) and differences in positions on those two lists will be specified

as well.

In determining the extent of the 150-verb list that will be compared to the textbooks,

a number of the most frequent phrasal verbs in the textbooks that will be admitted

further had to be established. A compromise between having a large enough sample and

not ending up with too long a list had to be considered. In the end, it was that the

textbook-based list included in the text should contain more than 15 entries, but less

than 30. As many phrasal verbs found in the textbooks share the same number of

occurrences, it would not be possible to come up with a precise number that would be

the same for all the three textbooks. Therefore, the limit for a minimal number of

occurrences was set at four, which yielded a satisfactory number of entries. Three tables

(one for each textbook) containing phrasal verbs that appeared at least four times will

therefore be compared with the Liu’s (2011) list in three sections, where each will

correspond to one of the textbooks.

24 This list was described in the third chapter

49
 4.4.2. Second stage

The second analysis section will focus on text types, which are represented by David

Lee’s Classification25 in the BNC, therefore concentrating on the research question (Q2).

Because corpora consist of authentic texts or recordings, the phrasal verbs that appear

in fabricated textbook exercises or instructions will not be admitted into this part of the

analysis. Therefore, only such instances of phrasal verbs that appear in articles

and various texts, recordings and extracts from them will be included. It should be noted

that an occurrence in a listening exercise or a written text does not necessarily mean that

the phrasal verb will be assigned to a spoken or written domain, respectively.

It is also worth pointing out that this thesis will not investigate whether a text or

recording is truly authentic, but will instead refer to anything that has an authentic-

looking form26 as authentic. Although, for example, a conversation containing a phrasal

verb (or phrasal verbs) might be printed out in a textbook, this thesis takes into account

the register (in this case one of the spoken ones) which best corresponds to the one used

for actual production of the verb (verbs) and the language in general. Therefore, to give

another example, a transcribed dialogue will be assigned to the spoken register, while a

short story that is only read aloud to the written register. Furthermore, an inclusive

approach has been adopted, which means that as many exercises as possible have been

included. For example, short stories or articles that simultaneously function as a gap fill

exercise and other similar types of exercises have been included as well.

In order to provide an as meaningful comparison as possible, a lower-end threshold

for the number of phrasal verbs occurrences in the textbooks had to be established. It

was essential to find a compromise between having enough occurrences of a given

phrasal verb and having enough distinct phrasal verbs. It has been decided that this

25 Link containing the complete overview is repeated here: https://rdues.bcu.ac.uk/bncweb/genres.html for

reader’s convenience
26 Various articles, TV or radio news, discussions, face-to-face conversations and so on

50
threshold will be five27. Because each of the textbooks will be dealt with in the analysis,

this limit has to be applied to each textbook separately while keeping the threshold

equal for every textbook. The phrasal verbs28 that passed the aforementioned threshold

were then searched for in the BNC and the text types they appear in were noted. The

Word Sketch tool incorporated in the Sketch Engine was used for generating the phrasal

verbs. In order to verify the results, a random sample of 250 concordance lines (which is

the default Sketch Engine pre-set) was manually analysed in order to rule out possible

unsatisfactory constructions. The number of so deleted items was then proportionally

applied to the whole result provided by Word Sketch. In addition to this safety measure,

all instances of verbs followed by two particles (labelled phrasal-prepositional verbs in

this thesis e.g. put up with) were automatically excluded from the analysis.

What proved to be problematic was assigning the appropriate labels provided by David

Lee’s Classification to the textbook exercises. Although his selection of various registers

is rather broad, it is obviously not absolutely tailored to the typical textbook texts

or recordings. Therefore, some compromises had to be made. As this classification lists

a total of 16 newspaper categories, which would be very difficult to distinguish from

each other in the textbook texts, it was decided that they will be joined into one category

for the purposes of this analysis. The same procedure was applied to all non-academic

and academic prose types of texts, lectures, essays and letters.

If this had not been made, the textbook types would cover only about 16 of the 70

registers proposed by David Lee. Nevertheless, it still remained difficult to properly

classify some types of textbooks texts and recordings. After the aforementioned

adjustment, 40 out of the original 70 registers have remained. The BNC Audio

27 This yielded 18 phrasal verbs in total, while lowering the threshold to four would result in adding only
five more phrasal verbs and three was deemed to be simply too low to provide a reasonable comparison.
28 The complete list of the admitted phrasal verbs is provided in 5.2.

51
Index29was studied in order to find the most suitable spoken registers, while samples

from various less clear-cut written registers were examined in order to obtain the best

way of textbook exercise classification. Although the corpus types might not totally

correspond with the ones found in the textbooks, at least the language used should be

the closest as possible. The way of classification obtained was then consistently applied

across all selected exercises in the three textbooks. The classification of the originally

unclear cases is provided in the table below. The clear cases such as adverts or letters

are not included to keep the table shorter. DLC stands for David Lee’s Classification,

DLC tag for the text type abbreviation that is used in the BNC. All those labels can be

found under the following link: https://rdues.bcu.ac.uk/bncweb/genres.html or in the

BNC itself. An asterisk denotes that the further subclasses of the given category were

joined into one.

29 The complete BNC Audio Index is available under the following link:
https://bnc.phon.ox.ac.uk/transcripts-html/

52
 Table 1: Assignment of phrasal verbs to the text types distinguished by David Lee (2001)

Textbook text type DLC DLC tag

articles focusing on biography W_biography
factual information about
a person or persons
articles dealing with newspapers W_newsp_*
current affairs or
specified as newspapers
all written narratives novels and short stories W_fict_prose
articles centred around essay W_essay_*
the writer’s opinion
helpline submissions instructional texts/DIY W_instructional
all other articles popular magazines W_pop_lore
all conversations (both face-to-face conversations S_conv
face-to-face and
telephone)
speakers giving their TV or radio discussions S_radio_discussn
opinion on a topic
prepared radio planned speech, either S_speech_scripted
programmes with only dialogue or monologue
one person speaking
description of a picture more or less unprepared S_speech_unscripted
speech, either dialogue or
monologue
all spoken narratives oral history S_interview_oral_history
interviews/narratives

This classification enables to compare text types of phrasal verbs occurrences in the

textbooks to the corpus. This will be done in the final chapter of this thesis.

4.4.3. Third Stage

Unlike the first two parts of the analysis, the final one will not rely on corpus data

anymore. Instead, it will focus on the way how the identified phrasal verbs are used in

the textbooks, thus answering the research question (Q3). All instances of phrasal verbs

will be taken into account and split into three categories 30 according to their function –

no focus, indirect and direct exercise focus. The first category will largely concur

with the set of verbs that were dealt with in the second part of this analysis and will be

labelled as “no focus”. It means that such phrasal verbs located in an article, recording

30 This division was inspired by the one done by Gouverneur (2008)

53
or exercise are no longer explicitly used in another way. Of course, while students are

reading a text or listening to a recording, they might recognize a phrasal verb or even

learn it. However, as no production31 containing such phrasal verbs is taking place

whatsoever, it can be said that the exercise focus lies elsewhere.

As this delimitation of the “no focus” category produced many phrasal verbs whose

textbook use differs considerably, it has been decided to further split this category

into three subcategories – “authentic”, “exercise” and “instructions”. The “authentic”

subcategory includes the same set of phrasal verbs that have been used in the second

stage of the analysis, with the exception of texts or recordings that also serve as

exercises related to phrasal verbs to some extent. The “exercise” category subsumes

verbs that are included in exercises whose focus lies elsewhere (for example, filling in a

suitable modal verb). The subcategory “instructions” obviously includes instructions for

exercises, but also pieces of text that help learners with certain phenomena, present a

strategy or provide bullet points for further discussion (in short, textbook parts which

are not meant to represent authentic language and where students are only to read how

to do something).

“Indirect focus” refers to a situation where a phrasal verb is used in an exercise,

but without explicitly mentioning the term “phrasal verb(s)”. For example, fill in the

gap exercises where one of the words to be filled in is a particle corresponding to the

preceding lexical verb, but which are not serving as a practice of phrasal verbs, fit

into this category. One of the borderline cases was various bullet points usually used to

stimulate discussion or prompts in exercises. Eventually, bullet points/prompts made up

purely of phrasal verbs have been included in the “indirect focus” category, while short

sentences containing phrasal verbs appearing as bullet points/prompts have been

assigned to the “no focus” category.

31 Consequently, such phrasal verbs appear only receptively in the exercises

54
It should be stressed at this point that the analysis will take purely the textbook content

into account, disregarding potential exercise interpretations. Therefore, while a teacher

might use the exercise in a way that explicitly states the term “phrasal verb”, thus

making the exercise unfit for this category. But the analysis will be done on the textbook

level and not on the instructional level, so such possibilities will not be further explored.

On the contrary, “direct focus” means that the term “phrasal verb(s)” is used and

learners are aware that they are practising the use or form of phrasal verbs. Comments

to all these three groups will be provided individually for each textbook. In order to

maintain clarity, the commas in names of the categories (e.g. “direct focus”) will be

omitted in the analysis.

Now that all the essential information regarding the analysis process has been provided,

the following and final chapter will be concerned with the analysis itself. It will follow

the procedure described in 4.4. by using phrasal verbs found in the three textbooks

mentioned in 4.2. It will also answer the research questions provided at the beginning

of this chapter.

5. The Analysis

55
Before proceeding to the analysis steps described in the previous chapter, an overview

of the sample of phrasal verbs extracted from the three textbooks will be discussed and

summarized in three tables. From now on, the term “phrasal verb (verbs)” will be

shortened to “PV (PVs)”. Similarly, the textbooks New Headway and Maturita

Solutions will be referred to as only Headway and Solutions for reader’s convenience in

the following text. Similarly as Gardner and Davies (2007) have done, the particles

around and round will be combined in the following chapters. This is possible because

the two forms “are synonymous and represent mainly a usage variation between

American and British English (Liu, 2011, p. 668). From here on, only round will be

used, as it is the preferred variant in British English (Liu, 2011).

Table 2: Number of PVs and different PV forms in the textbooks

Unique PVs Occurrences Occurrences

Absolute Relative
Headway 102 268 2.29
Insight 110 286 2.04
Solutions 112 336 2.51
Total 19932 892

As shown in Table 2, 892 occurrences of phrasal verbs have been registered in the

textbooks. In total, 199 different PVs make up this number. According to the tabled

data, the amount of different phrasal verb forms is almost the same for every textbook,

while Solutions has by far the biggest number of occurrences (336) and Headway the

smallest (268). However, this is not directly comparable as the textbooks are varying in

length. Therefore, the last column shows the number of frequencies by page, with

Solutions once again having the most. Gardner and Davies (2007) pointed out that in the

BNC, PVs occur approximately once per 150 words. According to them, this can be

viewed as “roughly 2 [occurrences of PVs] per average page of written text” (Gardner

& Davies, 2007, p. 347). This observation is more or less in line with the textbook data,
32 Some of the expressions are overlapping across the textbooks, therefore this number is not the sum of
the previous three

56
as the textbooks include marginally more PVs per page. This might be expected given

the fact that PVs are explicitly taught as a term 33 in all the three textbooks, which

implies some degree of their concentrated use compared to the much more general

BNC, which also includes more academic text types where PVs are less likely to occur

(Darwin and Gray, 1999).

Table 3 summarizes how many lexical verbs and particles are included in the 199

unique PV forms. It can be seen that their distribution is relatively equal across the

textbooks with Insight including a bit more variety in this aspect.

Table 3: Number of different lexical verbs and particles in the textbooks

Unique lexical verbs Unique particles

Headway 66 14
Insight 73 15
Solutions 66 14
Total 11323 1723

It might be interesting to note that Gardner and Davies (2007) found out that the BNC

only distinguishes 16 adverbial particles, while there have been 17 found in the

textbooks. The ones that are not recognized by the BNC are ahead (go ahead), apart

(fall apart), behind (leave behind), forward (put forward) and together (get together).

However, such expressions comply with the PV definition formulated before and are

included in both dictionaries that were used as a helping hand. On the contrary, across,

by and about have not been identified as adverbial particles in the textbooks at all. That

might be not so surprising though, as across and by only function as adverbial particles

in 0.1% of cases, while about in 6.6% cases (Gardner & Davies, 2007). Instead, they are

often more prevalent in prepositional constructions. Gardner and Davies (2007) also

observed that when the 20 most frequent lexical verbs combine with all the particles,

such constructed PVs make up for 53.7% of all PVs in the BNC. When this is done in

33 Further details will follow in the third analysis stage

57
the sample of PVs extracted from the textbooks, the value is even substantially higher –

such PVs account for 65.7% of all occurrences of PVs in the textbooks. The main

reason for this difference might be the enormous productivity of PVs, which has already

been mentioned in 1.1. As textbooks present a more controlled (and selected) sample of

language that should than be repeated enough so students can acquire it, it follows that

there is not so much space for unusual or newly coined PVs, which have its place in the

authentic language. Complete lists of all PV occurrences sorted according to their

frequency for each textbook34 can be found in Appendix 1.

Table 4 is concerned with the amount of repetition of the identified PVs. Although the

number of phrasal verbs introduced in each textbook (always over 100) might seem

rather satisfying at first sight, sufficiency of their recurrence is perhaps a bit

questionable. After all, Thornbury (2002, as cited in Zafiri & Mukundan, 2013, p.

1828) claimed that regular occurrences “over spaced intervals35” dramatically increase

chances of being learned.

Table 4: Repetition of PVs in the textbooks (in percentages)

% Once At least four At least five times36

times
Headway 50.98 23.53 14.71
Insight 49.09 21.82 13.64
Solutions 50 26.79 18.75

Table 4 shows that a striking number of approximately 50 per cent of PVs appears only

once in the textbooks and every second PV has thus no repetition at all. As follows from

the last column of table 4, only around 15% of all PVs appear at least five times in each

textbook, which makes it debatable whether such numbers allow for the majority of PVs

to be learned. Thornbury (2002, as cited in Zafiri & Mukundan, 2013, p. 1828) stated

34 Combined lists for all textbooks can be easily created from these ones, it was decided not to include it
in the appendix due to space constraints and relatively low relevance for the thesis
35 Spaced intervals refer to the fact that there should be short pause(s) between the occurrences
36 The values of four and five were chosen because only PVs occurring four (five) times will be admitted
to the first (second) part of the analysis

58
that a minimum number of occurrences allowing for a good chance of remembering a

word should be seven. This indicates that it might prove useful to revisit many of the

PVs37 more often in the textbooks. However, the main reason why this table was shown

here (and will be further elaborated) is that it might provide a starting point for a

potentially interesting area of further research related to textbook language and/or

phrasal verbs. Another such area might be a focused cross-textbook comparison, which

will also not be attempted on a higher scale in the following chapters.

The first part of the analysis, which is concerned with frequency counts of the PVs that

were found in the textbook and their comparison to the BNC data, is as follows.

5.1. Frequency counts

The first part of the analysis will investigate frequencies of PVs and answer the research

question (Q1): What are the most frequent phrasal verbs in the textbooks compared to

the BNC? It will be done by providing three sections, each for one textbook. Every

section will follow the same structure and begin with a table containing a selection 38 of

the most frequent PV patterns in the given textbook and the corpus. The corpus part (the

two columns on the right) is based on the list of the most frequent PVs created by Liu

(2011). The two columns on the left contain the PVs from the given textbook sorted

according their number of occurrences. Also included are counts of PV occurrences,

which can be found in parentheses. In the middle, a position difference between the PV

in the textbook and the BNC is provided. “X” marks that the given PV is not found in

the Liu’s (2011) list and therefore not one of the 150 most frequent PVs in the BNC. As

it is beyond the scope of the thesis to determine the exact number of words that are

included in each textbook, or building a corpus out of the textbooks, this value cannot

37 Frequencies of the individual PVs will be provided in the first part of the analysis; it should be kept in
mind that although some have many occurrences, they are sometimes “crammed” into one page only in
the textbook, which will be indicated in the third analysis stage
38 This selection was described in 4.4.1.

59
be directly compared (in its relative form) to the BNC data. Liu’s (2011) list can be

found in its complete form (only for the BNC, COCA is not included), in Appendix 1 as

well as the full list for each textbook.

5.1.1. Headway

Table 5 shows that eight PVs that appear at least four times in Headway are also

included in Liu’s (2011) list of the 150 most frequent PVs in the BNC. Those eight PVs

account for one third (33%) of the ones depicted in the table 5.

Table 5: The most frequent PVs in Headway and the BNC

Ran Headway Difference BNC Ran

k k
1 pick up (14) +2 go on 1
2 grow up (12) +51 set up 2
2 work out (12) +14 pick up 3
4 go out (10) +2 go back 4
5 bring up (9) +35 come back 5
6 write down (8) +60 go out 6
7 get up (7) +18 turn out 7
7 give up (7) +16 find out 8
7 take off (7) +38 come up 9
10 find out (6) -2 make up 10
10 sit down (6) +10 take over 11
10 take up (6) +8 come out 12
13 break up (5) +68 come on 13
13 make up (5) -4 come in 14
13 run away (5) X go down 15
16 blow up (4) +101 work out 16
16 come over (4) +83 set out 17
16 cut off (4) +58 take up 18
16 fall out (4) X get back 19
16 look up (4) +10 sit down 20
16 put in (4) +98 turn out 21
16 sort out (4) +21 take on 22
16 turn on (4) X give up 23
16 wake up (4) +46 carry out 24

Only three PVs do not occur among the top 150 ones from the BNC and the first of

them, run away, is ranked only 13th in Headway. Some PVs tend to have rather similar

proportional frequency in both Headway and the BNC, especially the ones whose

60
position difference is 20 or smaller. Ten such PVs can be found in the table, including

pick up, go out and work out which are all very frequent in the textbook as well as in the

corpus. However, some prominent PVs from the BNC are missing in this table. Out of

the ten most frequent PVs in the BNC, only four (pick up, go out, find out and make up)

appear at least four times in Headway. Notable missing PVs are go on, which is the

most frequent in the BNC but appears only once in Headway, and set up, which is

second in the BNC but occurs only twice in Headway. Furthermore, the fourth most

frequent PV in the BNC (go back), is not included in Headway at all, similarly to turn

out (seventh in the BNC) and come up (ninth in the BNC).

On the contrary, some PVs are much more represented in Headway than in the corpus.

Good example is grow up, which the second most used PV in Headway but does not

appear so extensively in the BNC at all. While grow up is used in exercises and texts

of all sorts, write down (sixth in Headway) is solely used to give instructions 39, which is

probably why it is not represented so much in the corpus (66 th). Other examples of

“over-represented” PVs in Headway are the ones that are taught when talking about

relationships – break up and fall out. The PV blow up also appears much more often

in Headway and is located 101 positions higher than in the BNC, which is the biggest

difference in the table. However, it is only used in one sense in the textbook (blow up

a balloon) and two related exercises centred on the same topic, which explains its

relatively high number of occurrences. Type in has also been identified as having a

similar position difference (+98), but was exclusively used with PIN code as an object.

As the latest additions to the BNC date back to 1993 when paying with credit cards was

not as prevalent as it is nowadays, it is probably expected that such expressions are not

so frequent in the corpus.

5.1.2. Insight

39 This will be further discussed in 5.3.

61
Table 6 that depicts the data gained from Insight lists the same amount of PVs (24)

as the corresponding one for Headway.

Table 6: The most frequent PVs in Insight and the BNC

Ran Insight Difference BNC Ran

k k
1 find out (18) +7 go on 1
2 set up (11) 0 set up 2
3 put up (10) +33 pick up 3
4 give up (9) +19 go back 4
4 wake up (9) +58 come back 5
6 carry on (8) +21 go out 6
6 put on (8) +63 turn out 7
8 go out (7) -2 find out 8
9 get up (6) +16 come up 9
9 grow up (6) +44 make up 10
9 pick up (6) -6 take over 11
9 switch on (6) X come out 12
13 get back (5) +6 come on 13
13 move on (5) +59 come in 14
13 stand up (5) +20 go down 15
16 break down (4) +32 work out 16
16 die out (4) X set out 17
16 dream up (4) X take up 18
16 fall out (4) X get back 19
16 go away (4) X sit down 20
16 go on (4) -15 turn out 21
16 stop off (4) X take on 22
16 switch off (4) X give up 23
16 turn up (4) +22 carry out 24

Seven PVs (approximately 29% out of the ones depicted) are included on both lists,

but the number of PVs that are not included on the list compiled by Liu (2011) is quite

high. In total, there are seven such PVs as well as one (switch on) among the ten most

frequent in Headway. Both these features might indicate that the correspondence

between the two lists might be lower than in the case of Headway. However, all of the

three most frequent PVs in the BNC are included in Insight as well. Furthermore, the

position differences in Insight are not nearly as big as in Headway. Still, some of the

most frequent corpus PVs are missing in Insight completely, such as go back (fourth in

62
the BNC) and turn out (seventh), while come back (fifth) occurs only once in the

textbook. As far as PVs having a maximum of 20 positions difference between their

textbook and corpus ranking, eight such PVs have been identified in Insight.

Interestingly, set up is placed second in both Insight and the BNC and is therefore the

only PV in the three textbooks that retains its corpus position. The dominantly most

frequent PV in Insight, find out, is also frequently represented in the BNC, where it lies

on eight place. One of the reasons why find out occurs extensively in all three

textbooks, despite the fact that it is constantly used in one sense only, might be that it is

quite a versatile PV that can appear in instructions as well as in all sorts of textbook

exercises or texts.

Other PVs that are the most frequent in Insight are not so pronounced in the corpus data.

This is especially the case with the PVs put up (third in Insight), wake up (fourth) and

put on (sixth), which are from 33 up to 63 positions higher than in the list made by Liu

(2011). It might be also interesting to observe that both switch on and switch off are not

included on Liu´s (2011) list at all while being present in Insight. These PVs primarily

have “digital” objects in the textbook, such as computer or TV, which might be one of

the reasons why they are relatively less represented in the corpus given its age 4041.

Like Headway, Insight also includes the PV fall out, which is also explicitly taught

when dealing with vocabulary related to relationships.

5.1.3. Solutions

40 It also follows from the BNC data that both turn off and switch off are more frequent than turn on and
switch on, while Headway and Insight exhibit an opposite trend (turn on is more frequent than turn off in
both of them, and Solutions too, as it will be shown, and switch on is more frequent than switch off in
Insight)
41 However, such data also highly rely on circumstances and types of activities during which they were
collected. One of the analyses dealing with this was carried out by Baker (2008)

63
The final textbook left to be discussed in this part of the analysis is Solutions. Its most

prominent PVs are illustrated in table 7 below. Because Solutions includes the biggest

number of PVs, it is not surprising that table 7 illustrating the ones that appear at least

twice contains 30 PVs, thus six more than both Headway and Insight.

Table 7: The most frequent PVs in Solutions and the BNC

Ran Solutions Difference BNC Ran

k k
1 go out (28) +5 go on 1
2 find out (16) +6 set up 2
3 give away (15) X pick up 3
4 get up (14) +21 go back 4
5 look out (11) +54 come back 5
6 act out (9) X go out 6
7 sit down (8) +13 turn out 7
7 take off (8) +39 find out 8
7 wake up (8) +55 come up 9
10 chat up (7) X make up 10
10 work out (7) +6 take over 11
12 break down (6) +33 come out 12
12 go on (6) -11 come on 13
12 save up (6) X come in 14
15 ask out (5) X go down 15
15 come in (5) -3 work out 16
15 grow up (5) +39 set out 17
15 make up (5) -5 take up 18
15 pick up (5) -12 get back 19
15 put away (5) X sit down 20
15 stay in (5) X turn out 21
22 carry on (4) +5 take on 22
22 come back (4) -17 give up 23
22 come out (4) -10 carry out 24
22 fall out (4) X get up 25
22 check in (4) X look up 26
22 set off (4) +30 carry on 27
22 turn on (4) X build up 28
22 turn up (4) +16 go up 29
22 write down (4) +44 get out 30

Twelve PVs (40% out of the 30) are present in both lists, which is the highest proportion

out of the three textbooks. The most frequent PV in Solutions is by far go out, which is

64
also frequent (sixth) in the corpus, as well as second-placed find out (eight in the BNC).

Overall, there are 12 PVs in the table whose position difference is not higher than 20.

While this number encompasses almost half of the PVs in the table, some of the highly

frequent PVs from the BNC are once again missing in Solutions. In particular the

second-placed PV set up, which is represented only twice in the textbook. As in the

other two textbooks, go back (fourth in the BNC) does not appear at all in Solutions,

while turn out (seventh) appears at least once, which is the only occurrence of such

frequent corpus PV in all the three textbooks. Generally, it can be said that the variation

of PVs across Solutions and the BNC is lower than in the case of the other two

textbooks, as the largest position difference is 55 compared to 101 (Headway) and 63

(Insight)

One third of the PVs in table 7 is not found in Liu’s (2011) list, most notably give away,

which is the third most frequent PV in Solutions. However, all of its 15 occurrences

happen on two pages and twelve of them even in one text 42. Also the sixth-placed PV

in Solutions, act out, is nowhere to be found among the 150 most frequent PVs of the

BNC. The primary reason for this is the fact that act out is solely used to give

instructions in Solutions, similarly to write down, which is placed 22nd. Another case of

this sort is the fifth-placed PV look out, which is 54 positions up compared to its corpus

ranking. However, this PV is used solely as a heading of the so-called “Look out!”

boxes, which contain explanations and language-related tips, for example about the

difference between say and tell.

In contrast, the fourth-placed PV get up is never used in instructions and is present in

the list made by Liu (2011) as well, which indicates that the PVs that are not used

in instructions correspond with the corpus data rather well. As in the other two

42 The text is a story about a billionaire who spent his later years by giving away all of his money (the
text can be found on p. 88 in Solutions)

65
textbooks, grow up and wake up are much more represented in Solutions than in the

BNC. PVs related to relationships appear frequently once again and are represented by

chat up (10th), ask out (15th) and fall out (22nd) in the table for Solutions. All these PVs

do not appear in the list taken from the corpus.

The first part of the analysis dealt with frequencies of PVs found in the textbooks, while

the second one will focus on the text types they typically occur in.

5.2. Text Types

The aim of this analysis stage will be to identify in what types of texts or spoken

interactions PVs appear in the textbooks and compare these findings to the data from

the BNC. This aim is incorporated in the research question (Q2). As already mentioned

in 2.2.1., the BNC is primarily a written corpus, as approximately 90% of its content is

of a written type. However, the textbooks show mostly an opposite trend, as shown in

table 8. Table 8 provides an overview of three basic text types (written, spoken and non-

authentic) included in the three textbooks; the BNC data are shown as well

for comparison. The values for textbooks and the BNC are shown in rows, while

columns indicate the basic text types. The “non-authentic” category subsumes all parts

of the textbooks that do not have an authentic or authentic-like form, such as

instructions or gap fill exercises. Therefore, such category cannot be represented in the

BNC at all. This category will not be further discussed in this chapter, but will be dealt

with in the last part of the analysis.

Table 8: Overview of the basic text types in the textbooks and the BNC43

% Written Spoken Non-authentic

Headway 24 32 44
Insight 38 30 32
Solutions 21 29 50
BNC 90 10 0

43 Values in this table were exceptionally rounded to integer numbers as no more detailed data for the
BNC were found

66
Table 8 indicates that the non-authentic texts largely make up the majority of all texts of

the textbooks, as they are most numerous in both Headway and Solutions.

Furthermore, both of these textbooks display more PVs in the spoken domain than in

the written one. Insight stands out in both these aspects, as it includes more PVs in

written texts than in the non-authentic ones and spoken situations.

Not all PVs will be taken into account in the following part of the analysis, which was

already dealt with in the chapter describing methodology. The PVs that were admitted

into further discussion in this part of the analysis after applying the threshold of at least

five occurrences in authentic or authentic-like texts or recordings introduced in 4.4. are

listed in Table 9:

Table 9: List of PVs included in the further analysis for each textbook

Headway get up, go out, grow up, pick up, sit down
Insight carry on, find out, get up, give up, go out, grow up, pick up, put
on, put up, set up, stand up, switch on, wake up
Solutions come in, find out, give away, go on, go out, sit down, work out

Table 9 shows that the most of the selected PVs come from Insight (13 in total), which

is perhaps a bit surprising given the fact that Insight includes 52 less verbs than

Solutions but has almost twice as many as Solutions in this table. Solutions has

provided seven verbs, which is more comparable to Headway (five PVs), although

Headway lacks a full 70 PVs compared to Solutions. However, when looking at table 8,

such result might be expected as it largely corresponds with the amount of PVs in the

non-authentic category (last column). It is also observable in the table that only one PV

(go out) is shared among all the three textbooks. As Insight has substantially more

“authentic” PVs than the other two textbooks, it follows that the selected PVs cannot be

largely similar for all the three textbooks. However, four of the five PVs from Headway

are found in Insight as well. The subset of PVs taken from Solutions does not

67
correspond with Insight, as only two out of seven Solutions’ PVs are included in Insight

too.

After a careful collection of data for each PV depicted in table 9, it has become clear

that representation of the results that would be comprehensible and concise enough not

to take up too much space would be difficult. Therefore, the main features of the data

were summarized into one table for each textbook, which will be presented in the

beginning of the corresponding section. Each table contains six columns in total and the

first one (to the left) lists the PVs for each textbook. The second column contains the

text or spoken interaction type according to David Lee’s Classification (DLC Type). The

third and fourth columns contain information about the textbook position 44 of the genre

and the percentage of how many times the PV appears in this genre in the textbook

respectively. Finally, the last two columns include the same information with respect to

the BNC.

Each PV has two rows45 dedicated to it – the first one primarily lists the most frequent

genre in the textbook, whereas the second one does the same for the BNC. They also

provide the position and percentage of the given medium’s 46 most frequent genre in the

other medium. The genre selected for the upper row is always the most frequent one

in the textbook, while the genre represented in the lower row is the most common one in

the BNC. The full tables for each PV can be found in Appendix 2 and they will be

referred to during the analysis process.

5.2.1. Headway

44 After determining genres of the given PV, they were counted and the same genres were added up. Then
the genres were sorted according to their frequencies (1st is the most frequent), thus obtaining positions of
all the genres; the same was done for the BNC
45 In some cases, there is one row (because both the textbook and the BNC share the same most frequent
genre) or three rows (because the most frequent textbook genre is tied)
46 The term “medium” will refer to either the given textbook or the BNC in this chapter and “media”
collectively to both

68
As described before, each section will start with a table containing the most important

regarding the genres47 that the given PVs appear in most frequently, as does table 10

for Headway. The table was compiled from the tables H1-H5 that can be found

in Appendix 2. It is the shortest textbook-specific table of this chapter as it includes

merely five PVs.

Table 10: Prevailing genres where PVs appear in Headway compared to the BNC

PV DLC Type48 Headway Headway BNC BNC Percentage

Rank Percentage Rank
Get up S_interview 1 60 28 0.13
W_fict_prose x x 1 44.42
Go out S_conv 1 33.33 2 18.99
S_brdcast_discussn 1 33.33 11 1.41
W_fict_prose x x 1 29.78
Grow up S_conv 1 27.27 8 3.75
W_fict_prose x x 1 23.66
Pick up S_speech_unscripted 1 44.44 10 1.47
W_fict_prose x x 1 37.99
Sit down W_pop_lore 1 83.33 7 3.23
W_fict_prose 2 59.11 1 59.11

As seen in table 10, the BNC part of the five PVs is mostly unified. All of them are most

often found in fictional prose in the corpus, which is predominantly not reflected

in Headway. The written domain in general is not so dominant in Headway, as four of

the five PVs are most used in one of the genres belonging to the spoken domain. The

fiction genre appears only once in the textbook thanks to the PV sit down, but even in

this case it is only represented in one of its six occurrences. All its other occurrences are

in magazine-like articles, which are a genre that is seventh most frequent in the BNC,

which indicates that sit down is included in more or less the same text types in both

Headway and the BNC.

47 Genres will collectively refer to both text and spoken interaction types from now on
48 Complete list of categories distinguished by David Lee (2001) is linked here once again for reader’s
convenience: https://rdues.bcu.ac.uk/bncweb/genres.html

69
The same cannot be said for the remaining four, as the genre of fiction is missing among

their occurrences in Headway. Therefore, this information will not be repeated but kept

in mind throughout the rest of this section. However, some similarities can still be

found. For example, the PV go out is largely frequent in face-to-face conversations in

both media. It is not only its prevalent genre in Headway, but the second most frequent

one in the BNC as well. This PV is equally frequent (in Headway) in broadcast

discussions as well. This genre is also relatively well represented in the BNC, as it

covers at least over 1% of all occurrences of the PV. Go out has also been identified in

one of the essays in Headway, but this genre is more marginal in the BNC (29th).

Grow up has been spotted in six genres in total, which is the highest value for Headway

and some of the genres are often found in the BNC as well. Apart from conversations,

which were the most represented and Headway and are ranked eighth in the BNC, also

biographies, newspapers and magazine-like articles are among the top seven in both

media, thus indicating a great similarity of genres. However, this PV is not so common

in spoken interviews in the BNC (17th), whereas it was the second most frequent genre

in the textbook.

The final two PVs that are left to discuss – get up and pick up – mostly exhibit lower

genre correspondence than the previous three. The most characteristic genre of get up

in Headway is the one of spoken interviews, which is in contrast rather marginal in the

BNC (28th), where it accounts for only 0.13% of all cases. Its only other genre in the

textbook, broadcast discussion, is also not so prominent in the BNC (11th), although it is

not as negligible as the previous one. But still, the most prominent genres of get up in

the BNC are fiction, conversations and non-academic texts, which are all nowhere to be

found in Headway. Genres of pick up in Headway display more variety, as it has been

identified in four of them. However, the two most frequent Headway genres, which are

70
both spoken – unprepared speech and narrative – are not exactly the most represented

ones in the BNC, as they rank respectively 10th and 13th there. Only the category of

magazine-like articles is more frequent in both media, as it ranks fourth in Headway and

fifth in the BNC. The three most typical genres for this PV in the BNC are fiction, non-

academic texts and conversations.

The following section will deal with Insight and it will be the most prominent one of

this chapter.

5.2.2. Insight

By far the most numerous sections of this analysis stage is the one of Insight, where

13 PVs are represented. Table 11 shows the genres where they appear the most in both

Insight and the BNC. It is a shortened version of the tables I1-I13 that are enclosed

in Appendix 2.

Table 11: Prevailing genres where PVs appear in Insight compared to the BNC

PV DLC Genre Insight Insight BNC BNC Percentage

Rank Percentage Rank
Carry on W_fict_prose 1 25 1 17.95
S_brdcast_news 1 25 25 0.27
Find out S_interview 1 30 32 0.14
W_fict_prose x x 1 30.88
Get up W_pop_lore 1 40 5 4.33
W_fict_prose x x 1 44.42
Give up W_pop_lore 1 50 5 8.54
W_fict_prose 2 12.5 1 26.26
Go out S_interview 1 33.33 21 0.35
W_fict_prose 2 16.67 1 29.78
Grow up W_biography 1 50 7 6.91
W_fict_prose x x 1 23.66
Pick up W_pop_lore 1 40 5 7.35
W_fict_prose 2 20 1 37.99
Put on W_pop_lore 1 66.67 4 5.68
S_conv x x 1 31.47
Put up S_conv 1 60 3 12.62
W_fict_prose x x 1 19.52
Set up S_interview 1 33.33 26 0.12
W_non_ac* x x 1 21.63
Stand up W_pop_lore 1 60 7 3.45

71
 W_fict_prose x x 1 64.3
Switch on S_speech_unscripted 1 80 17 0.32
W_fict_prose x x 1 44.92
Wake up S_speech_scripted 1 33.33 x x
W_fict_prose x x 1 41.31

Once again, is it clearly visible from table 11 that vast majority of the PVs are most

commonly used in the category of written fictional prose. This category is prevalent

in the BNC in 11 out of the 13 cases depicted above. Like Headway, Insight does not

exactly follow this trend, as nine out of 13 PVs are not found in such genre in Insight at

all. What seems to be the prevalent genre in Insight is the one of magazine-like articles,

where five of the PVs appear the most. It is also indicated that the spoken domain is

more represented in the textbook, as five PVs appear primarily in one of the spoken

genres, whereas there is only one such instance in the BNC. There is only one verb in

Insight that corresponds with the domination of fictional prose in the BNC, namely

carry on. One quarter of its occurrences is in fiction, which is comparable to almost

18% in the BNC. However, other genres do not correspond so well. Carry on is often

found in broadcasts and spoken interview (tied 3rd) in Insight, but these genres are only

marginal in the BNC (25th and 33rd, respectively).

Other PVs that are frequently included in fiction in both Insight and the BNC are give

up, go out and pick up. All these PVs are predominantly found in fiction in the BNC,

while their occurrences in this genre are the second most frequent in Insight. It is also

shown in the table that give up is very frequent in magazine-like articles in both media,

which is also the case for go out and pick up. Give up is also represented in broadcast

discussions and letters (both tied 2nd) in the textbooks, but these categories are scarce in

the BNC (38th and 26th, respectively). The same goes for go out, which is most

72
frequently found in spoken interviews in Insight (2nd), but this category is not so

pronounced in the BNC (21st).

Another PV that mostly appears in rather similar genres in both media is put on. It

appears most frequently in fiction in Insight, which is the fourth most frequent category

in the BNC. Furthermore, magazine-like articles are the second most frequent genre for

this PV in both media. Although the aforementioned genres are similarly frequent for

the both media, put on is mostly found in spoken conversations in the BNC, where it is

totally missing in Insight. As indicated in table 11, both put up and stand up primarily

occur in fictional prose49 in the BNC, which is a genre that they are not included in

Insight. However, the other genres (two for each PV) they are represented in Insight are

common in the BNC as well. Put up is primarily situated in face-to-face conversation in

Insight, which is the third most common genre in the BNC. The second most frequent

Insight genre for this PV is magazine-like articles, which are on fourth position in the

BNC. Stand up is frequently found in magazine-like articles (1 st in Insight, 7th in the

BNC) and newspapers (2nd in Insight. 5th in the BNC) in both media.

The remaining PVs (find out, get up, grow up, and wake up) have rather mixed

correspondence between their most prevalent genres. Find out has been identified in six

genres in Insight, which is, together with carry on, the largest number in this chapter.

However, its most frequent Insight genre (spoken interviews) is one of the least

common ones in the BNC (32nd). This PV is also found in broadcast documentaries (2 nd)

and discussions (4th) in Insight, while these categories are once again much less

pronounced in the BNC (12th and 27th, respectively). It also does not appear at all in

fiction in Insight, which is the prevalent genre in the BNC. However, find out often

49 It should be noted that the proportion of this genre for stand up is over 64% in the BNC, which is the
highest value from all the data gained from the corpus. This makes its Insight absence even more striking

73
occurs in face-to-face conversations (2nd in Insight, 7th in the BNC), biographies (4th in

Insight, 8th in the BNC) and magazine-like articles (4th in both) in both media.

Get up appears primarily in magazine-like articles in Insight, which is a category that is

also common in the BNC (5th). The PV is also frequent in conversations in both media,

as it is the second most typical genre in both of them. However, its other two prominent

Insight genres –documentaries and prepared speech (tied 2nd) – are rather marginal cases

in the BNC (38th and 26th, respectively). Once again, fiction has been found the most

used genre in the BNC, but there was no such case in Insight.

Although grow up is frequently found in biographies in both media, the other genres

that this PV appear in differ a great deal among Insight and the BNC. The situation of

switch on is similar. It often occurs in face-to-face conversations in both Insight (2nd)

and the BNC (4th), but the dominant textbook category (unprepared speech) is only the

17th most frequent in the BNC. One third of occurrences of set up in Insight is in spoken

interviews, which is a genre that is represented in substantially under one per cent of

cases in the BNC. This situation is the same for all its other textbook genres apart from

magazine-like articles, which are frequently represented in both media. This PV is often

found in non-academic and academic texts as well as in newspapers, which are genres

that are absent in Insight for this particular PV.

Wake up is also found in rather different genres in each medium. Although it is

frequently represented in magazine-like articles in both Insight and the BNC, the most

frequent Insight genre (prepared speech) is not represented in the BNC at all, which is

interesting given its much bigger size. It is also found in letters and instructional texts in

the textbook, which are also marginal categories in the BNC (each makes up for only

about 0.1% of all occurrences of the PV). The most frequent BNC genres for wake up

74
are fiction, face-to-face conversations and non-academic texts, all of which are not

present in Insight at all.

The last textbook that is left to be discussed in this chapter is Solutions, which will be

the focus of the following section.

5.2.3. Solutions

As already stated in the introductory part of this chapter, the amount of PVs in Solutions

lies between Headway and Insight. Therefore, table 12 will present the seven PVs

from Solutions that have passed the aforementioned threshold of at least five textbook

occurrences in authentic texts or recordings. Complete tables for each verb (S1-S7),

which were used as a basis for this table, are enclosed in Appendix 2.

Table 12: Prevailing genres where PVs appear in Solutions compared to the BNC

PV DLC Type Headway Headway BNC BNC Percentage

Rank Percentage Rank
Come in S_conv 1 60 2 15.31
W_fict_prose x x 1 34.57
Find out W_pop_lore 1 33.33 4 8.34
W_fict_prose 2 16.67 1 30.88
Give away W_pop_lore 1 100 3 13.90
W_fict_prose x x 1 24.55
Go on S_consult 1 40 29 0.18
S_conv 1 40 2 12.14
W_fict_prose x x 1 36.92
Go out S_conv 1 57.14 2 18.99
W_fict_prose 2 21.43 1 29.78
Sit down W_fict_prose 1 40 1 59.11
Work out W_pop_lore 1 80 4 9.31
W_fict_prose x x 1 16.71

All of the seven PVs depicted in table 12 are primarily used in fictional prose in the

BNC. This is a comparable situation to both tables 10 and 11, primarily to the one

depicting the PVs in Headway, as there every single PV is most frequently situated in

this genre as well. Solutions again presents a bit of a different state of affairs, as only

three of the seven PVs appear in fiction. Magazine-like articles seem to be prevalent in

75
the textbook as three PVs are primarily used in this genre, which is followed by face-to-

face conversations (two PVs).

Although the genre of consultations50 has not been identified in the other two textbooks,

it is the most frequent genre where go on appears in Solutions and is also included

among the genres where sit down occurs. Sit down is also the only PV whose dominant

Solutions genre is fiction. In addition, both media share the second most frequent genre

– face-to-face conversations. This is quite an unusual case, as sit down is the only PV in

the analysis whose two most prominent genres are the same in both the textbook and the

BNC. Apart from the aforementioned genres, the two other identified textbook ones 51

are rather peripheral in the BNC, as they together account for only 0.34% of all

occurrences.

Other PVs that feature representation of fiction in both media are go out and find out.

As well as sit down, go out also has the identical two most frequent genres in both

Solutions and the BNC, but in a reversed order. It is also the PV with the most

occurrences (14) in this chapter. Most of them appear in face-to-face conversations,

which is the second most frequent category in the BNC. As stated before, the dominant

category in the BNC is fiction, which is in turn the second most typical one in Solutions.

Also narratives are well represented in both media (4th in Solutions, 7th in the BNC),

whereas the genre of letters, which accounts for two of the 14 occurrences, is rather

marginal in the BNC (32nd). As far as find out is concerned, it is most typically found in

magazine-like articles in the textbook, which is its fourth most typical genre in the BNC.

Four genres are tied on second place and among them is also fiction, the prominent

BNC genre. However, the other three genres – interview, prepared speech and narrative

50 In Solutions, it is represented by a doctor giving advice to his patient (p. 40 and 42)
51 both of them are spoken – consultations and interviews

76
– are not so frequent in the BNC (especially the first two) and they together cover just

over 1% of all occurrences of find out.

All the remaining PVs are not represented in fiction in Solutions at all. Work out has

been identified in two genres in Solutions, where both of them are written, which is an

unusual case in the textbooks. It is most typically situated in magazine-like articles in

Solutions, which is the fourth most prominent category in the BNC. It has been also

found in an advert in the textbook, but this genre is not so represented in the BNC (19th).

Come in is located in three genres in Solutions and all of them are in turn spoken.

Prevalent are face-to-face conversations, which are very frequent in the BNC as well, as

they occupy 2nd place there. Not totally infrequent in the BNC are also broadcast

discussions (11th), which is the second most frequent genre of come in in Solutions

together with interviews. However, spoken interviews are not so typical for the

occurrences of come in in the BNC, as they account for only 0.33% of its occurrences

(23rd position). Interesting case is the PV give away. As indicated in 5.1.3., all of its

occurrences in Solutions are concentrated on one page and centred on one article.

Therefore, it is not surprising that all its authentic occurrences in Solutions come from

only one article and thus all belong to the genre of magazine-like articles. It is quite

frequent in the corpus as well, as it is its third most prominent genre.

All the aforementioned PVs have displayed a rather good correspondence of genres

at least in the case of their most prominent one (or ones) in Solutions. This does not hold

up so well for go on. It is found most in consultations in Solutions, which is a peripheral

category in the BNC (only 29th). It is also prominent in face-to-face conversations,

which rank 2nd in the BNC and this category is therefore well represented in both media.

Its third genre in Solutions, which is the one of interviews, is not typical in the BNC

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(26th). Instead, apart from fiction and conversations, the most frequent genres in the

BNC for go on are newspapers and non-academic texts.

While the previous two analysis steps have contrasted textbook findings to the corpus

data, the final stage of the analysis will be primarily concerned with the way PVs are

used in the textbooks.

5.3. Functions of PVs in the Textbooks

As already indicated, the main aim of the last analysis chapter will be to study how PVs

are used in the textbooks, as formulated in the research question (Q3). Table 13 shows

a breakdown of the three main categories – no focus, indirect and direct focus.

Specifications of the no focus category are not included here in order to provide a

clearer overview and will be discussed in more detail in the sections corresponding to

the individual textbooks.

Table 13: Distribution of PVs into textbook exercise types according to their focus
(in percentages)
% No focus Indirect focus Direct focus
Headway 78.11 0.75 21.13
Insight 78.67 9.44 11.88
Solutions 73.89 8.61 17.51

A trend is visible – most of the PVs (around three quarters of them) appear in parts of

the textbooks where the focus lies elsewhere, which is to be expected. It should also be

noted that the proportion of PVs situated in this category is more or less the same for all

the textbooks. Direct focus is prevalent over the indirect one in all the three textbooks,

albeit to a different degree in all of them. The difference between those categories is

particularly pronounced in Headway, which includes almost no “indirect” PVs at all,

while the indirect and direct focus categories are relatively balanced in Insight. The

reason for the more explicit focus in Headway might well be its syllabus, which is the

most structural one out of the three textbooks. Solutions includes a larger amount of

explicitly presented PVs than Insight primarily because the textbook contains

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substantial amount of pages dedicated to grammar and vocabulary practice following its

ten units.

What follows now are three sections devoted to the individual textbooks, which will

include all the categories delimitated in 4.4.3. Like the previous chapters, also one will

also follow the same format for every textbook.

At the start of each textbook section, a table showing distribution into the three

categories of PV use (no focus, indirect focus, and direct focus) will be provided and

these three categories will then be discussed individually. The authentic subcategory of

the no focus category will not be dealt with any further as it was already the main

concern of the previous chapter. As far as the category of instructions is concerned,

Zafiri and Mukundan (2013) said that PVs with instructional functions are “far from

pedagogically exploited” and likely not to be caught by student attention as formats of

the exercises “indicate what the students are required to do” (p. 1824). Therefore, the no

focus category will be discussed rather briefly and more attention will be devoted to the

indirect and direct focus categories instead.

5.3.1. Headway

Table 14 indicates that the division of PVs in Headway is rather imbalanced, although it

follows the trend of all the three textbooks.

Table 14: Distribution of PVs into exercise types according to their focus in Headway
(in percentages)
No focus Indirect focus Direct focus
78.11
Authentic Exercise Instructions 0.75 21.13
55.85 13.96 8.30

What is interesting at first glance is the very low percentage of PVs in the indirect focus

group, which is compensated by a significant amount of PVs in the direct focus class.

More than a half of all PVs belongs to the authentic category, which has already been

79
studied in the previous analysis section. All the categories except for the authentic one

will now be discussed in more detail below.

5.3.1.1. No focus.

The class of instructions, which makes up for approximately one tenth of this category,

includes primarily the prototypical examples such as act out, fill in, or write down,

which already indicate what the following exercise will be about. The only two PVs

standing out are hold on and wake up – the first one is included in a box which helps

students with phenomena occurring in spoken English; in this case the use of just. The

latter one is part of an example how to start the Fortunately, Unfortunately game52,

which is suggested as a lesson starter.

Exercises with no focus on PVs contain approximately twice as many exemplars as the

instructions class and cover a variety of tasks. Such used PVs can be found in eight out

of the ten units and also in extra materials intended for writing exercises. The most

frequent PV in this category is go out, which appears four times in completely different

exercises (choosing a correct verb form, matching, making and rewriting sentences).

This already indicates that variety in this subclass is large, but given the fact that it is

not centred on PVs, it does not justify its elaborate description in this thesis. Therefore,

only a brief description of this category (such as the one above) will also be provided

for the remaining two textbooks.

5.3.1.2. Indirect focus.

This is the smallest section of the whole chapter, as only two PVs have fallen into it –

put up and take off. They are both used in multiple choice gap fill exercises where

learners are to select which verb form fits into the provided gap:

(13) His plane took off/has taken off a few minutes ago. (p. 35)

52 The game is started by a statement (e.g. I woke up early this morning), students react using responses
with appropriate use of fortunately/unfortunately. For example: Fortunately, it was a lovely day
(description taken from p. 22 in Headway).

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 (14) Dan asked his mum put up/putting up/to put up his Australian friends. (p.

63)

Therefore, the main focus of both these exercises was the form, more precisely the tense

of the PVs in question. Such an extremely low amount of PVs in this category suggests

that the authors of Headway wanted to present PVs in a more explicit way than the

other two textbooks, which is indicated in table 14. This is most likely closely tied to its

syllabus, which exhibits the biggest tilt towards the structural features.

5.3.1.3. Direct focus.

First of all, it should be noted that Headway has the biggest percentage of PVs

belonging to this category out of the three textbooks. In total, 56 explicitly presented

PVs have been identified in Headway. This is not a small number; however, all those

PVs occur in only two lessons and three textbook pages in total. Five of the PVs are

used in a reading exercise (p. 35), which is a rare example in this category as it is one of

rare examples of PVs in an authentic piece of text. Six sentences are provided next to

the text with one verb in bold and the task is to find a phrasal verb in the text that has

the same meaning and replace the verb in bold with it, for example:

(15) Electronics items increase the value of the rooms. (p. 34, the corresponding

phrasal verb in the text is push up)

Thus, the focus of this exercise is clearly the meaning of the given PVs, which are

included in the text. No options or other explicit clues are provided, so students have to

search through the text on their own to find the PVs. This implies that students need to

know how PVs are formed as well and find all the lexical verb + particle combinations,

which is the simplest definition of PVs that was provided in 1.1.1.

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The following page (36) is completely devoted to PVs and includes four 53 exercises

explicitly dealing with PVs. Two of the exercises are dealing with meanings senses

of take off, bring up, cut off and pick up. The task is to identify which meaning is literal

and which idiomatic, as in the following example (p. 36, ex. 2):

(16a) The village was cut off by the floods.

(16b) Hello, hello? I can’t hear you. I think we’ve been cut off.

(16c) She cut off a big piece of meat and gave it to the dog.

This exercise also stresses meaning and indicates that PVs can have various meanings,

both literal and idiomatic. This can be seen as a more student-centred approach

compared to the ones found in Insight or later stages of Headway, where dictionary

entries listing all the meanings are often provided and students only read them. Here,

their task is to work out the meaning(s) based on the context.

The following exercise provides seven sentences with PVs 54 and introduces the term

“separable PVs”. All sentences include an object in italics that is to be replaced with

a personal pronoun, two sentences are given as an example in the textbook, with one

of them being the following:

(17) He turned on the light. – He turned it on. (p. 36, ex. 3)

The remaining five sentences are then left to be done by the students. Students need to

be aware where the pronoun object is placed in the case of PVs, which is something that

was discussed earlier in 1.2. Thus, the focus here is on form and the use of pronouns,

which reinforces students’ notion of the correct word order. There is also exercise

dealing with inseparable PVs, but such constructions are labelled prepositional or

phrasal-prepositional verbs in this thesis.

53 There are five such exercises on the page, but exercise four is not included here as it only contains
prepositional verbs per definition formulated before
54 turn on, take off, take up, pick up, look up, bring up, give up

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The final exercise on this page dealing with PVs is a set of seven sentences with a gap

that is to be filled in with one of the four particles (with, up, to, after) that are provided

in a box above the sentences, but only combinations with up satisfy the definition of

PVs in this thesis. Apart from previously practised look up, give up, and pick up, take up

is included as well:

(18) Have you recently taken ____ any new sport or hobbies? (p. 36, ex. 5)

This exercise once again stresses the form of PVs, where a particle is required in order

for the lexical verb to “work” as a PV in the given context. Some awareness of meaning

is also needed here in order to assign the particles correctly, but this task functions most

likely as a reminder of some previously learned PVs, as the PVs have already been

introduced before at some point (and the vast majority of them in the previous

exercises).

The rest of PVs in the direct focus category are found on page 92, which is concerned

with PVs with the particles out and up. Like page 36, it is also a vocabulary practice

and phrasal verbs are mentioned in its heading. The page begins with dictionary entries

for three PVs – work sth out, work out and make sth up. Students are about to read them

and answer the following three questions: What are the verbs? What do sth and sb stand

for? Which groups of phrasal verbs are separable and inseparable? This is basically the

only such theoretical exercise that focuses more on the metalanguage than on the actual

presentation or practice of PVs. With answers to the previous questions in mind,

students are then asked to fill in eight sentences including a gap (or gaps) with the

correct form of one of the aforementioned PVs:

(19) Sherlock Holmes ____ who committed the crime. (worked out; p. 92, ex. 2)

The main aim of the exercise is to practice the PVs introduced through the dictionary

entries before. Both meaning and form are important here, as various tenses are

83
included in the answers. A bit freer practice of the PVs is provided in exercise five,

which will be discussed (soon) below.

The next exercise (3) introduced eight more PVs 55 containing out or up. It is a matching

exercise where learners match the PVs in the left column with short expressions

provided in the right column. For example, eat up is to be joined with all your greens be

healthy and break up should be combined with with a boyfriend/girlfriend. It follows

that meaning is the key here, as students have to work it out based on the context

(the expressions in the right column). Exercise number four then uses the PVs

introduced in the previous exercise and lists eight sentences with a word or phrase in

italics, which is replaceable with one of the PVs. Students are reminded that they should

use the correct form of the PVs:

(20) Have you discovered why you didn’t get the job? (found out; p. 92, ex. 4)

The aforementioned exercise provides a controlled practice of the PVs from the exercise

number three and students have to primarily remember their meanings in order to

correctly replace the phrase in italics, but the form is not neglected either as various

tenses are included

The final exercise discussed from Headway is more open, as its task is to finish eight

sentences containing PVs in “any suitable way” (p. 92) while working with a partner.

Examples of two of them are listed below:

(21a) I need to sort out... (p. 92, ex. 5)

(21b) I’ve just found out that..... (p. 92, ex. 5)

This exercise can be seen as a freer practice of the PVs introduced earlier on the page.

However, the PVs are already provided, which means that the students get to practice

mainly their meanings, as there is no space for changing the given PV.

5.3.2. Insight

55 find out, break up, eat up, eat out, save up, sort out, take up, fall out

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Table 15 depicts the breakdown of the use of PVs in the exercise types of Insight.

Table 15: Distribution of PVs into exercise types according to their focus in Insight
(in percentages)
No focus Indirect focus Direct focus
78.67
Authentic Exercise Instructions 9.44 11.88
55.94 16.78 5.94

Unlike Headway, Insight includes many more PVs without explicitly mentioning them,

which is indicated by the fact the indirect and direct focus categories contain almost the

same amount of PVs. It is also interesting to observe that the proportion of PVs in the

authentic class is the same as in Headway, whereas the category of instructions is by far

the least populated. More detailed description follows in the coming paragraphs.

5.3.2.1. No focus.

The class of instructions in Insight subsumes the least PVs out of the three textbooks.

However, compared to Headway for example, almost none of them are included in the

“typical” instructions. Instead, some of them are used as bullet points to help

with speaking exercises and most of them are included in various strategies (how to

write a letter of complaint, look up idioms in a dictionary, report on findings etc.). This

serves for a relative variety of PVs in this category, as 16 occurrences are made up 11

different PVs, with find out being the most frequent (3 entries).

Variety is present also in the exercises with no PV focus, as this class of 47 PVs in total

is represented in every unit of Insight, two reviews and most of the vocabulary banks.

Because of this diversity, it is difficult to generalize the findings, but the PVs tend to

occur primarily in vocabulary and writing exercises. Most often, the task of such

exercises is matching or choosing a correct word form. However, this might be down to

the characteristics of the whole textbook.

5.3.2.2. Indirect focus.

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The indirect focus category in Insight is not as empty as in Headway, as it contains 29

instances of PVs, which appear in seven units; one review and two vocabulary builders.

In order to concentrate on the more prominent types of exercises, only those that contain

at least two PVs will be discussed. One such exercise is a follow-up task of an article

about an endangered island on page 42. Nine verbs, including PVs wash away and

die out, are highlighted. The task is to complete gaps in the subsequent article with the

correct form of highlighted verbs, therefore the exercise aims to practice the selected

expressions from the article. One sentence from the gap fill article follows as an

example:

(22) ...rising sea levels ____ homes and sometimes whole islands... (are washing

away; p. 42, ex. 5)

There is no specific focus on PVs, as most of the highlighted verbs are not phrasal.

Students have to work out their meaning from the text, as no definitions are provided.

There is also only one gap in the sentence intended for the PV to be filled in,

which suggests that the possibly varying object position (as mentioned in 1.2.) is not the

concern here. However, both awareness of meaning and form are important to complete

the exercise.

Another exercise can be found on page 59 and deals with the second conditional. Its aim

is to practice the correct form of the verbs in second conditional. Students are asked to

fill in the gaps in six sentences with the correct form of words in brackets; the PV

find out is used twice as the expression enclosed in brackets:

(23) If Simon ____ (find out) that Jack knows the truth, what ____ (he/do)?

(p. 59, ex. 8)

Given this shape of the exercise, it is not necessary to know the meaning of find out at

all and all the focus lies on its form (tense). This is a bit of a borderline case as the fact

86
that there is a PV in the brackets instead of a single verb does make virtually no

difference in how the task is approached.

While the previous exercise had established no specific context, the following one is

more focused as it is an interview with eight blanks in it. Its aim is to practice the

expressions have/get something done. The topic is Christmas preparations and students

are once again asked to fill in the blanks with the expressions provided in brackets.

Three of them use PVs – put up is used twice and switch on once:

(24) We ____ (have/it/put up) yesterday, and we ____ (get/the lights/switch on) by

Father Christmas tomorrow. (p. 75, ex. 8)

As in the previous exercise, also this one is focused purely on form and the notion that

have/get should be in present simple, while the following verb in past perfect tense.

Once again, the particle hardly makes any difference. The last six occurrences of PVs

discussed here are found on page 135 in one of the vocabulary banks. The topic is

transport and therefore it is rather unsurprising that PVs such as slow down, speed up

and take off appear, each of them twice. Their first appearance is in a mind map, which

is focused on four means of transport – “coach”, “plane”, “ship” and “train” – and

students are asked to assign provided nouns and verbs to these categories. The PVs are

then also used in a subsequent gap fill exercise, which is a set of four short stories

related to travelling. While the mind map serves to assign all the expressions to the

means of transport they are most related to, the aim of the second exercise is to practice

those expressions, as in the following example:

(25) ... so the driver ____ to overtake them. (speeded up; p. 135, ex. 2)

The former exercise is focused on meaning, while the latter one primarily on form,

as meanings have already been established and the task now is to fill in the correct form

of the introduced expressions. Once again, the fact that PVs also include particles is not

87
so prominent here as the PVs are already provided in its complete form and no

grammatical changes happen to the particle. Of course, the direct focus category,

which will be discussed in the next paragraphs, is a bit of a different story in this aspect.

5.3.2.3. Direct focus.

As stated before, the direct focus category in Insight is not as numerous as in Headway

and includes only seven more PVs that the indirect one. These PVs can be found in only

two units and one vocabulary bank, so the term “phrasal verb” appears on only four

pages of the textbook. Furthermore, all their occurrences apart from one exercise are

outside of the unit core, as they are either in the vocabulary/review section or in the

vocabulary bank. The first exercise mentioning PVs explicitly is found in the

vocabulary section of unit five. The whole page is dedicated to PVs and it also provides

their definition and division into intransitive, transitive separable and inseparable

categories. This already suggests that the textbook uses the term “phrasal verb” for both

PVs and prepositional verbs. The first exercise uses an extract from a previous listening,

which contains six phrasal verbs that students should find and determine their meaning.

However, only grow up satisfied this thesis’s definition of PVs. Afterwards, dictionary

entries for three PVs containing the lexical verb fall56 are provided and learners are

asked to classify them into one of the aforementioned categories. Those PVs are then

used in the next exercise that contains six questions and the task is to correct possible

mistakes, such as in the example (26):

(26) He has fallen his mother out. (incorrect because fall out is not separable;

p. 66, ex. 3)

This exercise puts focus on form, as the previous assignment into the grammatical

categories of PVs can be used as a checklist to successfully complete the task.

The textbook also asks the students to state reasons for their choices, which was not

56 fall apart, fall out and fall through

88
explicitly required in Headway. Following the previous exercise, three more PVs

containing the lexical verb put57are introduced once again using their dictionary entries.

After a follow-up exercise where students match four pairs of sentences in order to

construct a mini dialogue, the fifth exercise of the page provides six series of prompts

that are to be arranged in the correct order to make sentences. The prompts use three

of the PVs introduced before – fall through, put sth up and put up sth, but they do not

include particles, which should be deduced by the students:

(27) a fight/She/the attacker/put/against (She put up a fight against the attacker;

p. 66, ex. 5)

Both exercises are similar in a way that they both require arranging things into a certain

order. The main difference is that exercise four asks student to form a dialogue and thus

primarily focus on form, exercise number five has a more grammatical focus, as

students need to be aware of the word order of English sentences. Furthermore, the need

for adding particles once again stresses that phrasal verbs need two components to make

them complete.

The final exercise on this page relies on students completely, as it instructs them to look

up three PVs formed from the lexical verb get (get away, get round sb and get sb down)

in a dictionary and then determine their grammatical category and provide an example

sentence for each PV. It is freer in practice than the one before, as no specific

requirements are made. A more authentic text type is used on page 108, which contains

an article about a day in the digital world, where there are seven PVs 58 highlighted.

They are then used in a follow-up exercise, which contains eight sentences with phrases

in italics. These phrases are to be replaced with one of the PVs from the article and thus

the aim is to practice the PVs in a controlled way. Students therefore need to study

57 put sb up, put sth up, put up sth

58 break down, dig up, hit off, log in, open up, pick on and stress out

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context of the PVs (which are highlighted in the article) and the aim is to practice the

PVs from the article by using them in the appropriate situation replacing the phrase in

italics:

(28) She doesn’t usually talk freely about her feelings. (open up; p. 108, ex. 4)

This indicates that the main focus is on meaning, which is not explicitly defined for the

PVs, but students need to grasp it from the article. This controlled practice of the PVs

from the article also requires use of their correct form. Another exercise where PVs are

explicitly mentioned is a short story about meeting a friend. The story includes six

blanks, where either lexical verb or particle of the given PV are missing and should

therefore be filled in. In total, three PVs59 selected from the ones appearing in the

aforementioned exercise are included; one of them is illustrated below:

(29) I met Tom at a party and we hit it ____ immediately. (off; p. 119, ex. 1)

This is the only exercise in all three textbooks that does not completely specify the

element that has to be filled in – this one leaves two options and thus provides two

points of view on PVs in one exercise, which might prove useful. No options are

provided; meaning and from are therefore both important and students get a clear

reminder that PVs consists of two equally important elements. Also the last exercise

discussed here can be seen as having an authentic background, as it is a story about a

woman and a famous politician in Myanmar. The text includes eight PVs 60 in total and

the task is to find and match them to definitions provided below the exercise; for

example: give in – to admit that you have been defeated. This exercise is similar to the

one on page 108, but this time, PVs are not highlighted and students need to identify

them on their own, while also figuring out their meanings. The PVs are then not further

used in any other way in the textbook.

59 break down, hit off, open up

60 back down, ease off, fight back, give in, step up, take on, throw out and take back

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 5.3.3. Solutions

Table 16 shows that Solutions include a bit less PVs used in authentic texts or

recordings, while more PVs appear in the other no focus subcategories, as it has

relatively the most PVs used in exercises with no focus on PVs and instructions (when

compared to the other two textbooks).

Table 16: Distribution of PVs into exercise types according to their focus in Solutions
(in percentages)
No focus Indirect focus Direct focus
73.89
Authentic Exercise Instructions 8.61 17.51
42.73 17.81 13.35

It is also the only course book out of the three which has less than half of the PVs in the

authentic texts or recordings. Direct focus is more pronounced than in Insight, but less

than in Headway. More information about the individual categories can be found below.

5.3.3.1. No focus.

The subclass of instructions in Solutions is lengthier than in the other two textbooks,

but does not include much variety. The two most prominent PVs are act out and look

out, which have already been discussed in 5.1.3. and account for one third of the whole

category. It includes also other “phrasal teddy bears” (Zafiri & Mukundan, 2013, p.

1824) for purely instructional functions such as find out, read out or write down.

However, some of the PVs are included in sentences serving as examples of

grammatical phenomena (reported speech, a little vs little, present simple vs

continuous). It is interesting to observe that the PV get up is often included in such

examples.

The subclass of exercises with no focus on PVs is also the broadest in Solutions and is

represented in all but one unit as well as in most of the grammar and vocabulary

builders. They are most often present in grammar builders, while their occurrences in

exercises related to vocabulary practice is rare, especially compared to Insight. Get up is

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once again the most prominent PV of this category, this time together with go out. The

most common type of exercise they appear in is generally filling in the gaps or choosing

a correct word form, most often in exercises that practise tenses.

5.3.3.2. Indirect focus.

Although it is not the case in percentages, Solutions includes the most PVs in both

indirect and direct category in absolute terms. The 29 indirectly used PVs are, very

much like in Insight, scattered around the textbook, as they are represented in four units

and reviews as well as in several grammar builders. As in the corresponding section of

Insight, only exercises containing at least two PVs will be further discussed.

The first of such exercises can be found on page 64. At the beginning of the seventh

lesson, various phrases related to dating and relationships are provided in a box,

which also includes three PVs61 – ask somebody out, chat somebody up and make up.

Students should work in pairs and arrange these phrases into the order that might

happen in a relationship. This is one of rare exercises in the (in) direct categories,

which potentially involves some speaking, as students might need to discuss and argue

their points. The phrases from the box are further used in a following exercise, which is

a story about a couple with fourteen gaps 62, which should be filled in with particles,

or left empty:

(30) She said yes, and Zak and Lily went ____ for three months. (out; p. 65,

ex. 2)

This exercise has a focus on form, but primarily requires knowledge of the phrases

from the box. This indicates that the aim is not to deal with grammatical aspects of PVs

or other similar expressions, but mainly to practice the phrases related to the topic of

relationships. The next instances of indirectly used PVs are situated in the language

61 The other potential PVs in this box, such as fall out, are listed with a further particle (with in the case
of fall out) and are therefore considered to be instances of phrasal-prepositional verbs
62 Apart from the aforementioned PVs, this exercise also includes fall out and go out

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review after units seven and eight. It resembles the previously described exercise both

due to its topic and the use of the same PVs, but this time, the lexical verbs should be

filled in a text with gaps. Interestingly, the correct form of the verbs is already provided

in the box. One of the sentences from this exercise is listed below:

(31) Noah has ____ Scarlett out and she said no. (asked; p. 82, ex. 1)

The form of this exercise supports the previous claim that the expressions are important

here and not their form, as that is already provided in the box. Therefore, this exercise

stresses meanings of the individual PVs related to relationships. Other PVs are included

in a speaking exercise on page 99. Students are asked to describe a picture using words

that are provided in a box. Two of the expressions are the PVs look up and look down,

which are both used in their literal senses. The aforementioned exercise is rather

a borderline case in this category, as it is likely that the students would not pay too much

attention to form of those specific words, thus probably not realizing they are in fact

PVs. The last exercise that will be discussed here is situated in grammar builder nine. It

is once again concerned with filling in the blanks in six sentences. Above them, a box

containing six verbs is provided and they should be filled in together with a reflexive

pronoun. The exercise contains two PVs, namely turn off and turn on:

(32) Our heating has a timer switch and can ____ ____ on and off. (turn itself;

p. 125. ex. 2)

As indicated above, both PVs are used in one sentence, which can help students to

remember the correct particles after the lexical verb turn in this meaning sense.

The primary focus and aim here is to fill in the correct forms of pronouns, as the section

of this grammar builder is devoted to them. However, meanings of the lexical verbs are

important as well as they partly determine which of the pronouns (or their forms) will

be used.

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 5.3.3.3. Direct focus.

Although Headway has a higher proportion of PVs in the direct focus category,

Solutions includes 59 such used PVs in total, which is the highest number in all the

textbooks. However, the PVs appear in three units and vocabulary builders and are

concentrated in only eight exercises, which indicates that exercises with PVs in

Solutions include more of them than the other two textbooks. First of the exercises

makes use of the reading that precedes it and that includes six PVs 63. Students should

identify the PVs on their own in the text and then fill in their particles into a set of eight

sentences with a gap:

(33) She usually sets ____ for work at 6.00am. (out; p. 21, ex. 3)

This exercise thus reinforces the notion that PVs consist of two clearly different

components. No options are provided, therefore it is essential for the students to identify

the PVs (preferably on their own) in the text. The focus here is on form, as students do

not even need to know what the PV mean in order to fill in the particle successfully,

because they have all the PVs in the previous text.

Another exercise explicitly dealing with PVs that is based on an article is present on

page 29. Three PVs (find out, carry out and work out) are highlighted in two texts and

the task is to join them with their definitions provided in one of the follow-up exercises.

Therefore, unlike the previous exercise, this one targets the meaning of the PVs

in question and a context (the article) is provided to help the students to identify it

correctly. The offered definitions are rather brief however; the correct ones of the three

aforementioned PVs are learn, discover (both belong to find out), do and deduce.

The final explicit appearance of PVs in the regular units is on page 60, where a box

containing four intransitive phrasal verbs (break down, carry on, get up and wake up) is

63 find out, go out, set off, sit down, throw away and turn up (twice)

94
provided. Description of the term of intransitive PVs is introduced 64 and one example

sentence is given. Students are also asked to find two more intransitive PVs (go out and

stay in) in a previous dialogue. There are no other PVs in the article, which means that

students do not have to check whether the grammatical properties of intransitive PVs

hold and can purely look for combination of a verb and a particle. No further use of

these PVs is made throughout the rest of the units and PVs appear again only in

vocabulary builder two, which is probably a bit surprising given the fact that the box

containing the grammatical explanation is included, but the term is not further practised.

Vocabulary builder two includes two exercises, which are preceded by a box that

establishes the difference between transitive and intransitive PVs, as also outlined in

this thesis (1.1.1.). Afterwards, students should read six pairs of sentences containing

PVs65 and decide which is correct in each pair based on the (un)necessity of an object.

For example: Our car broke down (correct)/Our car broke down the engine (incorrect).

This exercise already makes it necessary to be able to identify the object and thus

distinguish transitive PVs from the intransitive ones. The second exercise starts with a

box that contains four transitive PVs - call back, call off, put away and put on.

These PVs then serve for rewriting sentences that contain a phrase in bold that should

be replaced by one of the PVs:

(34) They cancelled the football match because of the rain. (called off; p. 130,

ex. 2)

The aim of this exercise is not to identify objects or other grammatical phenomena

anymore (as students know that all PVs are transitive), but it transfers its attention to the

meaning of the individual PVs, whose knowledge is vital to complete the exercise.

64 However, its formulation is a bit strange. It states that intransitive PVs do not take a direct object and
that the verb and the preposition cannot be separated – the presence of preposition in this explanation
seems to be a bit off, as the particles included in the box have an adverbial function. Thus, Solutions
seems to refer to what is termed particles in this thesis as to prepositions
65 break down, go off and go out

95
The following page (131) includes another theoretical box about PVs, which deals

with their separability. This is closely tied to pronoun placement, which has already

been discussed in 1.4. and is one of the useful means of how to differentiate PVs from

other multi-word verbs. The subsequent is made up of seven sentences 66 that once again

contain a phrase in bold, which should be this time replaced by a pronoun and moved to

the slot between the lexical verb and its particle, which is the only possible position as

stated in 1.4. An example follows:

(35) Kieran worked out the answer. (worked it out; p. 131, ex. 1)

This exercise has a clearly grammatical focus, as the students are made aware where

does the pronoun functioning as the object belongs in the previous box. This exercise

thus provides an opportunity for controlled practice of the previously described

grammatical point and helps students to establish the correct word order when dealing

with PVs.

Vocabulary builder six on page 134 repeats the table from page 60 dealing with

intransitive PVs, which is followed by a box containing eight more intransitive PVs 67.

They should then be once again used (using their correct form) to replace phrases in

bold in the upcoming set of eight sentences; one of them is provided below:

(36) We returned home from the match exhausted. (came back; p. 134, ex. 1)

This exercise is the “intransitive counterpart” to the exercise two on page 130 with a

clear focus on meaning.

Eight more sentences with phrases in bold are listed in the following exercise, which is

also the last one in this category. This time, PVs are included as well and students

should identify which sentences are wrong and correct them. The sentences include both

transitive and intransitive PVs68. The aim is to practice the difference between transitive

66 Which include the following five PVs: give out, make up, put away, take off (twice) and work out
67 come back, fall through, give up, go out, grow up, hold on, stand up and stay in
68 come back, get up, grow up, hold on, sit down, stand up, take off and wake up

96
and intransitive PVs by identifying incorrectly used objects; the only necessary

corrections are simply crossing them out. Such as in the following sentence, where the

object in bold is redundant:

(37) The plane did not take off the runway until midnight. (p. 134, ex. 2)

This exercise focuses on transitivity, similarly to the first exercise in vocabulary builder

two. However, this one is more complicated as it includes eight unrelated sentenced

instead of similar pairs, which makes it more difficult to see the incorrect pattern.

After the results have been presented in the previous chapters, the following chapter

will not only summarize and discuss them, but will also provide their implications for

future research.

97
 6. Discussion
The final chapter of this thesis will be split into three main sections. The first section

will summarize the results, comment on the key findings and relate them to the

previously undertaken research (where applicable) described in the third chapter. The

second one will list some limitations of the analysis or the things that could have been

done differently, while the final one will be concerned with possibilities of future

research in the field of textbook use of PVs and other relevant areas.

6.1. Discussion of Results

The main aim of this thesis was to study the patterns of phrasal verbs in intermediate

volumes New Headway (4th edition), Insight and Maturita Solutions and compare the

findings to the data gained from the British National Corpus (BNC). In total, 892

occurrences of PVs were registered and PVs appeared a little above twice per page

on average.
The first part of the analysis was concerned with the comparison of frequency counts

of PVs in the textbooks and the BNC. It was observed that Solutions had the most PVs

in both the absolute and relative (per page) senses. The analysis then took PVs with

at least four occurrences in the given textbook into account, sorted them according to

their frequency and compared their textbook positions to the ones in Liu’s (2011) list.

The results proved to be rather mixed. After the list of PVs of at least four textbook

98
occurrences was compared to the part of Liu’s (2011) list including the same number

of PVs, it was discovered that approximately one third (from 29% in Insight up to 40%

in Solutions) of PVs was situated in both tables. Similar percentages of PVs had lower

position difference than twenty among the two lists – from 33% in Insight up to 42%

in Headway. This indicates that Insight has the lowest overall correspondence of PV

frequencies, while Headway and Solutions are rather comparable in this aspect.
Although the most frequent PV of all in each textbook was always also among the most

frequent ones in the BNC, some very prominent PVs in the BNC did not appear

sufficiently in any of the three analysed textbooks. Especially striking is the case of

go back (4th in the BNC), which does not appear in any of the textbooks at all, just like

turn out (7th in the BNC)69. In contrast, some PVs, such as find out, go out and pick up,

were determined to be very frequent in both media70. A couple of PVs were also

consistently frequent in the textbooks, while not so prevalent in the corpus; most

notably fall out and wake up.

The study of frequencies seems to be the most prominent area in the research related to

phrasal verbs or other phenomena in the textbooks and their comparison to the corpus

data. The high frequency of the PV fall out or more prominent presence of break up

in the textbooks indicates that the textbook authors indeed tend to present expressions

(in this case PVs) based on the topic and not their lexical verb for example, as

Koprowski (2005) already pointed out. This trend is most observable in Solutions,

which also frequently includes ask out or chat up that are clearly relevant to the topic of

relationships.
The mixed results of this part of the analysis were thus to be expected, as the

researchers have already claimed that the outcome of similar analyses was inconsistent

or even puzzling (Gouverneur, 2008; Zafiri & Mukundan, 2013). Zafiri and Mukundan

69 Another PV from the BNC top 10 not present at least four times in each textbook is make up (9th in the
BNC)
70 As in the fifth chapter, the term “media” refers to both the three textbooks and the BNC

99
(2013) also found out that the results were often distorted due to high frequencies of

PVs that function solely to give instructions with no learning objective in mind. This is

in line with the findings of this thesis, as such PVs also appeared here. Examples of

them include act out, look out and write down – once again, primarily in Solutions. Also

some of the PVs appearing frequently in the three selected textbooks for this analysis,

such as find out or work out, have been used for these purposes in many cases. Overall,

although many PVs are frequently included in both media, the methods of the selection

of PVs to be included in the textbooks remains questionable, as many frequent

exemplars from the BNC were neglected.

The second stage of the analysis consisted of the text types and genres where PVs

appear in the both media and their comparison. It was clearly shown in table 8 that

while the BNC is primarily a written corpus, while textbooks are more inclined to use

PVs in spoken contexts. They are dominant in both Headway and Solutions, while

Insight includes them a bit more in written contexts. About one third of all PV

occurrences in the textbooks were in non-authentic or fabricated exercises or

instructions and were thus not included in the analysis, as corpora contain only

authentic data.
Only PVs with at least five occurrences in authentic-like textbook texts or recordings

were taken into account. Interestingly, the most PVs that surpassed this limit came from

Insight (13), which has the lowest number of PVs per page out of the three textbooks.

Headway (5) and Solutions (7) are comparable in this aspect, although Headway

includes significantly fewer PVs than Solutions. The most frequent genre in Headway is

that of face-to-face conversations, while magazine-like articles are prevalent in both

Insight and Solutions, and therefore also when the three textbooks are combined

together. In the BNC, fictional prose is dominant as it is the most frequent genre in 23

100
out of the 25 PV instances in total. This genre is rather absent in the textbooks, as it is

the most frequent one in only two cases and 15 PVs are not found in this text type at all.
It has to be admitted that this comparison cannot be fair in its every detail, as textbooks

simply cannot include all the genres that the BNC does. However, the main similarities

or differences are still observable. PVs are overall frequently included in face-to-face

conversations and magazine-like articles in both media. The textbooks tend to include

a bigger proportion of PVs in genres like interviews, letters or essays and spoken

narratives. On the contrary, apart from the aforementioned fictional prose, newspapers

and non-academic articles from specialized fields are substantially under-represented

in the textbooks compared to the BNC data.

It is understandable that the focus of English textbooks cannot be presenting extensive

amount of fiction or academic articles, some potentially valuable and frequent PVs

might get lost from the textbooks when omitting these genres (as indicated in the

frequency tables in 5.1.). This might be an opportunity for teachers to step in and enrich

the textbook syllabus with supplementary materials that would cover these genres. For

example, students could read English books (or their simplified versions based on their

level) and then prepare a presentation or discuss and interpret its content together in

class or in a written paper. Teachers could also encourage their students to follow news

from the English-speaking world. This might turn out to be a successful way of

delivering the parts of lexical content (not only PVs) that may be perceived as neglected

in the textbooks to the students71.

The final part of the analysis dealt with the function of PVs in textbook exercises.

For such purposes, textbook exercises were divided into three main categories – direct,

indirect and no focus72 on PVs. In each textbook, vast majority of PVs (around 75%)

belongs in the no focus category. The least prominent is the indirect focus category,

71 Such as the PV turn out used in this sentence, which was found to be heavily under-represented in the
textbooks with only one occurrence in all of them combined
72 Because of many very differently used PVs in the no focus category, it was further split into the
following subclasses: authentic, exercises and instructions

101
while direct focus lies somewhere in between for all the three textbooks. Gouverneur

(2008) established the same three categories when studying textbook use of patterns

including make and take. However, she considered only vocabulary exercises, thus

excluding most of the texts from the no focus category of this thesis. She found out that

in her three analysed textbooks (Cutting Edge, Inside Out and Headway), direct focus is

dominating while no focus is virtually non-existent and indirect focus rather negligible.

If this thesis adopted such an approach, the findings would be similar, although the

direct focus category would be not as dominant, which is expected given the narrower

scope73 of the studied phenomenon. Interestingly, when she studied advanced volumes

of the textbooks, the order of the categories was the same as in this thesis despite the

different definitions of the categories.

Although the number of PVs in the no focus category is comparable in all the textbooks,

the other classes exhibit some differences. Headway contains almost no PVs in the

indirect focus category, while having the biggest proportion of direct focus. Insight and

Solutions would have been comparable in this aspect had it not been for the fact that

Solutions includes many vocabulary builder sections after the core units and thus offers

more explicitly mentioned PVs. The trend observable in Headway is given by its

syllabus, which exhibits most structural features out of the three. As far as the actual use

of PVs in the textbooks is concerned, it is rather similar in all three. Almost all the

exercises (with the exception of two) are written and rather controlled with few

possibilities for freer production of PVs.

Focus on both form and meaning is present in all the textbooks, which also all

distinguish transitive and intransitive PVs. Each textbook also deals with the placement

of pronouns and separability of PVs, but their terminology is not consistent 74 with the

73 After all, make and take are one of the most frequent English verbs and are also subsumed in many
PVs
74 Because they use PVs as the umbrella term for all types of multi-word verbs introduced in the first
chapter

102
one used in this thesis. The indirect focus category consists almost exclusively of

exercises that require filling in particles or use PVs in their prompts. There is a lot of

gap filling also in the direct focus category, which combines mainly with replacing a

given phrase with the corresponding PV, choosing whether sentences containing PVs

are correct based on the PV’s transitivity, or simply matching PVs to their definitions.
It might be perceived as a bit unfortunate that the vast majority of the textbook sections

dealing explicitly with PVs gives a list of PVs and then offers two to four very

controlled exercises of one of the types mentioned above. The exercises also tend to be

concentrated on a very small space (typically one page) and then not to be mentioned

for several units. The most striking example can be found in Headway on page 60. A

box presenting the definition and examples of intransitive PV is provided and students

are asked to find another two such PVs in a dialogue. However, none of the PVs is then

used in any explicit way throughout the rest of the textbook units. Of course, there is a

small number of exceptions to the aforementioned possible shortcomings. However, as

it has been indicated that PVs are very productive and mainly used in less formal

contexts, it might be worth trying scattering them more across the textbook and adding a

larger variety of exercises by allowing students to figure out some patterns by

themselves instead of purely presenting them in grammar boxes. Of course, the

aforementioned features are also dependent on the individual textbooks. Thus, it could

be interesting to study other contemporary English textbooks (preferably with various

types of syllabuses) as well.

After pointing out the key results and comparing them to some of the research presented

in the third chapter, it is now time to turn to limitations of the analysis and possible

areas of further research.

6.2. Limitations of the Analysis

103
Although this thesis might provide a valuable insight into the use of phrasal verbs in

some of the currently most exploited ELT textbooks in the Czech Republic, it inevitably

also has some limitations. The first three are closely tied to the BNC. As the first two

parts of the analysis rely on the part of speech tagging incorporated in the BNC, it

should be made clear that this tagging system might have its flaws, thus potentially

influencing the results. However, Gardner and Davies (2007) pointed out that the rate of

tagging inaccuracies in the BNC is 1.58% for adverbial and 0.59% for prepositional

prepositions according to the BNC authors, which is a sufficiently small percentage in

the opinion of Gardner and Davies (2007, p. 342).

Another seemingly problematic aspect might be the division into genres, which was

done in the second analysis stage. Although the division was done very carefully, it is

virtually impossible to achieve one to one correspondence with the categories proposed

by David Lee (2001). Furthermore, it can be hardly assumed that there is the same

amount of text in the BNC coming from all the genres. It should be also remarked that

the basic distribution (spoken/written/non-authentic) varies a great deal between the

textbooks and the BNC. Both of the aforementioned aspects might affect the results. The

last BNC-related aspect is its age, as no texts have been added at all since 1993.

However, after comparing PVs in the BNC to COCA, Liu (2011) concluded that “PV

use has remained fairly stable” and that the lists for both COCA and the BNC “may

withstand the test of time” (p. 671). Furthermore, this thesis has not taken various

meaning senses of PVs into account mainly because it would be beyond its scope had

the structure been retained. As PVs are known to be very productive, it is quite likely

that the study of their senses might provide illuminating results.

The aforementioned limitations are in many cases related to the areas of further

research; some of them will be suggested in the following section.

6.3. Areas of Further Research

104
This thesis starts with a chapter on multi-word verbs and then goes on to state that only

PVs will be further discussed. Therefore, it might be an obvious choice to extend the

analysis to prepositional and phrasal-prepositional verbs as well, as these categories also

include interesting exemplars that might be challenging for language learners all over

the world. Furthermore, all of the three categories of multi-word verbs are often simply

called “phrasal verbs” in the textbooks, as already mentioned above. Because of this,

strictly adhering to one of the linguistic definitions of PVs might seem to be too

restrictive from certain point of view. Oliveira and Avezedo (2012) provided analyses of

all the three main multi-word verbs categories, for example. It was admitted in the

section 6.2. that the various meaning senses of PVs have not been taken into account in

the analysis, so another research possibility would be to compare the prevalent

meanings in the textbooks to the corpus data. Gardner and Davies (2007) used the

online lexical database WordNet75 for determining the number of senses for the 100 most

frequent PVs in the BNC that contain one of the twenty most common lexical verbs.

They reached the conclusion that the average number of meaning senses of one PV is

5.6. However, Garnier and Schmitt (2015) pointed out that WordNet sometimes tends to

generate rather redundant senses, which implies the need for further studies in this area.
Introduction to the analytical chapter (five) suggested further two aspects which have

not been covered here in the utmost detail – more focused textbook comparison (as this

analysis primarily compared textbooks to the BNC) and the amount of repetition of PVs

(as it has been indicated that it might be not satisfying enough). Choosing other (or

adding more) textbooks or changing the reference corpus (for example to COCA) might

provide interesting results from a bit of a different point of view as well. It could also

prove fruitful to adjust or simplify (for example by merging even more genres to make

the comparison more transparent) the method of comparing the genres that the PVs

75 It can be accessed from the following link: https://wordnetweb.princeton.edu/perl/webwn

105
appear in the textbooks and the corpus and thus to come up with more generalised

results.

Conclusion
The main focus of this thesis was on phrasal verbs. Given the fact that many researchers

are aware of and frequently point out the difficulty of learning, or even mastering,

phrasal verbs, it comes as a surprise that various studies suggest that their selection for

textbook use is rather inconsistent and not reasonably grounded. This thesis tried to shed

some light on their use in three contemporary English textbooks frequently used in

Czech secondary schools – New Headway, Insight and Maturita Solutions. In order to

verify whether this use corresponds to natural language, the thesis made use of data

from the British National Corpus (BNC). Thus, the main aim of the thesis was to study

the patterns of use of phrasal verbs in the three textbooks and compare them to the BNC

data.

The thesis offered six chapters in total, where the initial two were theoretical. At first,

a clear line was drawn between phrasal verbs and other types of multi-word verbs. A

more lenient definition of phrasal verbs was adopted, which allowed for a substantial

amount of expressions to be admitted into the analysis. What followed was a chapter on

the most necessary tool of this thesis – corpora. The definition of phrasal verbs used in

this thesis was selected in line with previously undertaken research, which was

presented in the third chapter. The fourth chapter outlined all the vital components of

the research methodology, which was then put in practice in chapter five, which was

concerned with the analysis itself. As this thesis has a practical basis, the analysis

formed the central part of the thesis. Results of the analysis were presented in three

subchapters, each corresponding to one of the research questions. The results were

illustrated in tables separately for each textbook, which enabled a clear overview of
106
data. They were then commented on in the later paragraphs. The final chapter was the

discussion, which not only summarized the results, but also stated some limitations of

this thesis and provided suggestions for future research in the field.

The analysis in this thesis consisted of three main layers, where each had its own

research question76 on which it was centred. The first analysis section dealt with

frequency counts of PVs and compared the ones in the textbooks the BNC-based list put

together by Liu (2011), which includes the 150 most frequent phrasal verbs in the BNC.

The second stage of the analysis was concerned with the comparison of genres where

phrasal verbs appear in the textbooks and the BNC. Finally, the third layer of the

analysis departed from the corpus data and was centred on the function of phrasal verbs

in the three textbooks instead. It is apparent from the results of this thesis that PVs are

substantially covered in all of the three textbooks, as many occurrences of phrasal verbs

have been identified. However, its comparison to the BNC data have shown some

discrepancies. The BNC surely cannot be taken as the only and ultimate measure of the

present English language. However, those differences are sometimes substantial enough

that they, together with some of the conclusions presented in the previous research

outlined in the third chapter, warrant further study in this field.

76 These research questions were the following: What are the most frequent phrasal verbs in the
textbooks compared to the BNC? In what types of texts and spoken interactions are phrasal verbs used in
the textbooks compared to the BNC? In which ways are phrasal verbs used in the textbooks?

107
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Oliveira, T. & Avezedo, A. M. T. (2012). A Descriptive Study on Multi-Word Verbs

Based On the Analysis of English Textbooks Recommended By the Brazilian

Textbook National Program – PLND 2012. Retrieved March 30, 2018, from

https://www.unemat.br/revistas/moinhos/media/files/A_DESCRIPTIVE_STUDY

_ON_MULTI_WORD_VERBS.pdf

Quirk, R., Greenbaum, S., Leech, G., & Svartvik, J. (1985). A Comprehensive Grammar

of the English Language. London: Longman.

Römer, U. (2004). Textbooks: A corpus-driven approach to modal auxiliaries and their

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Sawyer, J.H. (2000). Comments on Clayton M. Darwin and Loretta S. Gray’s “Going

after the phrasal verb: An alternative approach to classification”: A reader reacts.

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https://www.jstor.org/stable/3588100

Sinclair, J. (1991). Corpus, Concordance, Collocation. Oxford: Oxford University

Press.

Sládková, V. (2017). UČEBNICE ANGLICKÉHO JAZYKA NEJČASTĚJI

POUŽÍVANÉ NA STŘEDNÍCH ŠKOLÁCH PŘIPRAVUJÍCÍCH STUDENTY

KE SPOLEČNÉ ČÁSTI MATURITNÍ ZKOUŠKY Z ANGLIČTINY. Auspicia,

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https://www.natcorp.ox.ac.uk/

The Collins Corpus (n. d.). Retrieved March 30, 2018, from

https://collins.co.uk/pages/elt-cobuild-reference-the-collins-corpus

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Thomas, J. (2016). Discovering English with Sketch Engine: A Corpus-based approach

to Language Exploration (2nd ed.). Brno: Versatile.

Zafiri, A. & Mukundan, J. (2013). Selection and Presentation of Phrasal Verbs in ELT

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https://doi.org/10.4304/tpls.3.10.1821-1829

112
113
 Resumé in English
This master’s thesis deals with phrasal verbs in three English textbooks that are

currently (April 2018) widely used in secondary schools in the Czech Republic, namely

New Headway, Insight and Maturita Solutions. Phrasal verbs pose a substantial

challenge for both students and teachers, as many languages do not include such

constructions at all. Furthermore, both productivity and versatility of phrasal verbs is so

profound that it might be rather difficult to keep up with all their forms. It should be

stressed that phrasal verbs are studied not only with respect to their presentation in the

textbooks, but this thesis is also concerned with the degree of correspondence between

the textbook presentation and the natural use of phrasal verbs by native speakers. To

enable such comparison, the analysis makes use of data from the British National

Corpus (BNC), which is one of the most comprehensive English corpora that is freely

available on the Internet.

The main aim of the thesis is thus to study the patterns of use of phrasal verbs in the

textbooks and compare the findings to the data gained from the BNC. Both frequencies

of phrasal verbs in the textbooks and the text types they appear in are compared to the

BNC will be taken into account. Furthermore, the functions of phrasal verbs in textbook

exercises are also examined. The initial part of the thesis is rather theoretical and

presents the necessary background for understanding the notions of multi-word

(primarily phrasal) verbs and corpora. An overview of available research in the field is

then provided. The overview is followed by the description of research methodology.

The crucial part of the thesis is the analysis itself, where the results are presented step

by step. The final chapter includes a summary of the key findings and their relation to

previous research and outlines some limitations of the thesis and possible areas of

further research.

114
115
 Resumé in Czech
Tato magisterská diplomová práce se zabývá frázovými slovesy ve třech učebnicích

angličtiny, které jsou v současnosti (duben 2018) hojně používány na středních školách

v České republice. Těmito učebnicemi jsou New Headway, Insight a Maturita Solutions.

Frázová slovesa představují značnou výzvu jak pro žáky, tak učitele, jelikož v mnoha

jazycích se tento jev nevyskytuje. Počet nově vznikajících frázových sloves a široké

možnosti jejich použití ještě více komplikují průběh učení a činí všechny jejich tvary

těžko zapamatovatelnými. Frázová slovesa nejsou v této práci studována jen s ohledem

na jejich prezentaci ve zmíněných učebnicích. Práce se rovněž zabývá mírou podobnosti

mezi použitím frázových sloves v učebnici a v přirozeném jazyce rodilých mluvčích.

Toto porovnání umožňují data získaná z Britského národního korpusu (BNC), který

patří k nejobsáhlejším volně dostupným korpusům anglického jazyka.

Hlavním cílem této magisterské práce je studovat využití frázových sloves ve výše

zmíněných učebnicích a výsledky porovnat s daty získanými z BNC. V analýze jsou

porovnávány jak četnosti jednotlivých frázových sloves, tak typy textů, ve kterých se

frázová slovesa vyskytují nejčastěji. Dále jsou zkoumány funkce frázových sloves

v učebnicových cvičeních. Úvodní část práce je především teoretická a jejím záměrem

je vysvětlení nezbytného základu pro porozumění pojmům víceslovná (především

frázová) slovesa a korpusy. Poté následuje přehled dosud publikovaných výsledků

výzkumu v oboru. Tento přehled předchází představení metodologie výzkumu použité

v této práci. Stěžejní částí práce je kapitola obsahující samotnou analýzu a postupné

představení jejích výsledků. Poslední kapitola obsahuje shrnutí nejdůležitějších zjištění

116
a jejich vztah k dosud publikovaným studiím, nástin omezení této práce a možnosti

dalšího výzkumu.

117
 Appendix 1

Headway

Table A1: All occurrences of PVs in Headway sorted according to their frequency

Ran Rank PV Count

k PV Count
1 pick up 14 51 calm down 1
2 grow up 12 51 carry on 1
2 work out 12 51 catch up 1
4 go out 10 51 come in 1
5 bring up 9 51 come on 1
6 write down 8 51 come out 1
7 get up 7 51 dig up 1
7 give up 7 51 fill in 1
7 take off 7 51 get down 1
10 find out 6 51 get out 1
10 sit down 6 51 get together 1
10 take up 6 51 go ahead 1
13 break up 5 51 go away 1
13 make up 5 51 go down 1
13 run away 5 51 go on 1
16 blow up 4 51 hang on 1
16 come over 4 51 have over 1
16 cut off 4 51 hold on 1
16 fall out 4 51 hold up 1
16 look up 4 51 keep up 1
16 put in 4 51 knock down 1
16 sort out 4 51 knock over 1
16 turn on 4 51 leave behind 1
16 wake up 4 51 look round 1
25 act out 3 51 mess round 1
25 come back 3 51 move back 1
25 come round 3 51 pass on 1
25 eat out 3 51 pull out 1
25 get back 3 51 push up 1
25 get on (with) 3 51 put forward 1
25 check in 3 51 run out 1
25 save up 3 51 rush round 1

118
25 stand up 3 51 send off 1
34 clean up 2 51 send out 1
34 cross out 2 51 set off 1
34 do up 2 51 set out 1
34 eat up 2 51 settle down 1
34 freak out 2 51 snap up 1
34 get round 2 51 spread out 1
34 give away 2 51 sum up 1
34 hand over 2 51 switch off 1
34 log on 2 51 take away 1
34 move out 2 51 tear down 1
34 put down 2 51 tell off 1
34 put up 2 51 tidy up 1
34 set up 2 51 try on 1
34 slow down 2 51 turn off 1
34 stay out 2 51 walk away 1
34 stay up 2 51 walk out 1
34 take out 2 51 wrap up 1
51 break out 1
51 bring together 1

119
Insight

Table A2: All occurrences of PVs in Insight sorted according to their frequency

Ran
k PV Count Rank PV Count
1 find out 18 57 beat back 1
2 set up 11 57 bring up 1
3 put up 10 57 build up 1
4 give up 9 57 call out 1
4 wake up 9 57 carry out 1
6 carry on 8 57 clean up 1
6 put on 8 57 come along 1
8 go out 7 57 come back 1
9 get up 6 57 come on 1
9 grow up 6 57 come out 1
9 pick up 6 57 come round 1
9 switch on 6 57 dig up 1
13 get back 5 57 ease off 1
13 move on 5 57 eat out 1
13 stand up 5 57 fall apart 1
16 break down 4 57 fall off 1
16 die out 4 57 finish off 1
16 dream up 4 57 get away 1
16 fall out 4 57 get down 1
16 go away 4 57 get round 1
16 go on 4 57 give in 1
16 stop off 4 57 hand over 1
16 switch off 4 57 hang on 1
16 turn up 4 57 have back 1
25 give away 3 57 help out 1
25 go ahead 3 57 hold up 1
25 hand out 3 57 cheer up 1
25 hang out 3 57 keep out 1
25 hit off 3 57 leave behind 1
25 open up 3 57 link up 1
25 sign off 3 57 log in 1
25 soak up 3 57 look round 1
25 take up 3 57 make up 1

120
25 throw out 3 57 pass on 1
25 turn round 3 57 pick on 1
25 turn down 3 57 point out 1
25 work out 3 57 pull out 1
38 back down 2 57 put out 1
38 bring back 2 57 scare off 1
38 close down 2 57 send out 1
38 fall through 2 57 shake up 1
38 fight back 2 57 show off 1
38 give out 2 57 sit round 1
38 go down 2 57 sit down 1
38 let down 2 57 stay behind 1
38 look up 2 57 step up 1
38 read out 2 57 stress out 1
38 save up 2 57 take away 1
38 set out 2 57 take on 1
38 slow down 2 57 think up 1
38 speed up 2 57 throw away 1
38 take back 2 57 tune in 1
38 take off 2 57 turn on 1
38 try on 2 57 write down 1
38 try out 2 57 stress out 1
38 wash away 2

121
Solutions

Table A3: All occurrences of PVs in Solutions sorted according to their frequency

Ran
k PV Count Rank PV Count
1 go out 30 57 bend down 1
2 find out 16 57 bring up 1
3 give away 15 57 build up 1
4 get up 14 57 call back 1
5 look out 11 57 call off 1
6 act out 9 57 carry over 1
7 sit down 8 57 catch up 1
7 take off 8 57 clean out 1
7 wake up 8 57 come round 1
10 chat up 7 57 cut down 1
10 work out 7 57 cut up 1
12 break down 6 57 dig out 1
12 go on 6 57 drive up 1
12 save up 6 57 fall apart 1
15 ask out 5 57 fall through 1
15 come in 5 57 get out 1
15 grow up 5 57 give in 1
15 make up 5 57 give up 1
15 pick up 5 57 go ahead 1
15 put away 5 57 help out 1
15 stay in 5 57 hold up 1
22 carry on 4 57 hurry up 1
22 come back 4 57 chat away 1
22 come out 4 57 check out 1
22 fall out 4 57 cheer up 1
22 check in 4 57 look round 1
22 set off 4 57 look back 1
22 turn on 4 57 look down 1
22 turn up 4 57 mess up 1
22 write down 4 57 phase out 1
31 carry out 3 57 pull up 1
31 come on 3 57 put on 1

122
31 eat out 3 57 put out 1
31 go off 3 57 read out 1
31 heat up 3 57 run out 1
31 look up 3 57 see round 1
31 turn off 3 57 slow down 1
31 type in 3 57 split up 1
39 catch on 2 57 spring out 1
39 clear up 2 57 stand out 1
39 come over 2 57 stay behind 1
39 fall over 2 57 stick out 1
39 give out 2 57 sum up 1
39 go away 2 57 switch off 1
39 hang on 2 57 switch on 1
39 have back 2 57 take down 1
39 hold on 2 57 take out 1
39 log on 2 57 tie up 1
39 point out 2 57 top off 1
39 run away 2 57 travel round 1
39 set up 2 57 try out 1
39 stand up 2 57 turn down 1
39 take away 2 57 turn out 1
39 take up 2 57 wrap up 1
39 throw away 2 57 write in 1
39 try on 2 57 write out 1

123
Liu’s (2011) list

Table A4: The 150 most frequent PVs in the BNC according to Liu (2011)

Ran Ran PV
k PV k
1 go on 76 send out
2 set up 77 put back
3 pick up 78 keep up
4 go back 79 rule out
5 come back 80 pass on
6 go out 81 break up
7 turn out 82 come along
8 find out 83 come round
9 come up 84 sum up
10 make up 85 slow down
11 take over 86 run out
12 come out 87 sit up
13 come on 88 get in
14 come in 89 make out
15 go down 90 get off
16 work out 91 settle down
17 set out 92 pull up
18 take up 93 close down
19 get back 94 turn down
20 sit down 95 bring down
21 turn out 96 follow up
22 take on 97 lay down
23 give up 98 line up
24 carry out 99 come over
25 get up 100 break out
26 look up 101 go over
27 carry on 102 turn over
28 build up 103 go through
29 go up 104 reach out
30 get out 105 clean up

124
31 take out 106 back up
32 end up 107 hold on
33 come down 108 pick out
34 stand up 109 sit back
35 put down 110 keep on
36 put up 111 wind up
37 sort out 112 hold back
38 turn up 113 stand out
39 get on 114 put in
40 bring up 115 walk out
41 bring in 116 move in
42 look back 117 blow up
43 look down 118 take down
44 bring back 119 show up
45 break down 120 pull back
46 take off 121 put off
47 go off 122 come about
48 bring about 123 go along
49 open up 124 set about
50 hang on 125 pay off
51 go in 126 turn off
52 set off 127 give in
53 grow up 128 check out
54 fill in 129 come through
55 go round 130 move out
56 go ahead 131 move back
57 hand over 132 break off
58 put out 133 hang up
59 look out 134 get through
60 take back 135 give out
61 hold up 136 come off
62 wake up 137 take in
63 catch up 138 give back
64 turn round 139 set down
65 get down 140 throw out
66 write down 141 start out
67 hold out 142 move up
68 look round 143 shut down
69 put on 144 call out
70 shut up 145 step back
71 bring out 146 hang out
72 move on 147 figure out
73 pull out 148 lay out
74 cut off 149 play out
75 turn back 150 fill out

125
 Appendix 2
Headway

Table H1: Breakdown of genres the PV get up in Headway compared to the BNC (in percentages)

get up Headway Headway BNC BNC

DLC Type Rank Percentage Percentage Rank
S_interview 1 60 0.13 28
S_brdcast_discussn 2 40 0.78 11
W_fict_prose x x 44.42 1
S_conv x x 19.82 2
W_non_ac* x x 6.38 3

Table H2: Breakdown of genres the PV go out in Headway compared to the BNC (in percentages)

go out Headway Headway BNC BNC

DLC Type Rank Percentage Percentage Rank
S_conv 1 33.33 18.99 2
S_brdcast_discussn 1 33.33 1.41 11
S_speech_unscripted 4 16.67 0.76 16
W_essay* 4 16.67 0.17 29
W_fict_prose x x 29.78 1

Table H3: Breakdown of genres the PV grow up in Headway compared to the BNC (in percentages)

grow up Headway Headway BNC BNC

DLC Type Rank Percentage Percentage Rank
S_conv 1 27.27 3.75 8
S_brdcast_discussn 2 18.18 1.45 11
S_interview 2 18.18 0.34 17
W_biography 2 18.18 6.91 7
W_newsp* 5 9.09 9.42 4

126
 W_pop_lore 5 9.09 12.11 3
W_fict_prose x x 23.66 1

Table H4: Breakdown of genres the PV pick up in Headway compared to the BNC (in percentages)

pick up Headway Headway BNC BNC

DLC Type Rank Percentage Percentage Rank
S_speech_unscripted 1 44.44 1.47 10
S_interview_oral_history 2 22.22 1.14 13
W_instructional 2 22.22 0.43 19
W_pop_lore 4 11.11 7.35 5
W_fict_prose x x 37.99 1
W_newsp* x x 9.36 2
S_conv x x 9.31 3

Table H5: Breakdown of genres the PV sit down in Headway compared to the BNC (in percentages)

sit down Headway Headway BNC BNC

DLC Type Rank Percentage Percentage Rank
W_pop_lore 1 83.33 3.23 7
W_fict_prose 2 16.67 59.11 1

127
Insight

Table I1: Breakdown of genres the PV carry on in Insight compared to the BNC (in percentages)

carry on Insight Insight BNC BNC

DLC Type Rank Percentage Percentage Rank
W_fict_prose 1 25 17.95 1
S_brdcast_news 1 25 0.27 25
S_brdcast_discussn 3 12.5 0.74 17
S_interview 3 12.5 0.11 33
S_speech_scripted 3 12.5 0.11 33
W_pop_lore 3 12.5 7.09 7

Table I2: Breakdown of genres the PV find out in Insight compared to the BNC (in percentages)

find out Insight Insight BNC BNC

DLC Type Rank Percentage Percentage Rank
S_interview 1 30 0.14 32
S_brdcast_discussn 2 20 1.66 12
S_conv 2 20 5.55 7
S_brdcast_docummentary 4 10 0.19 27
W_biography 4 10 2.94 8
W_pop_lore 4 10 8.34 4
W_fict_prose x x 30.88 1

Table I3: Breakdown of genres the PV get up in Insight compared to the BNC (in percentages)

get up Insight Insight BNC BNC

DLC Type Rank Percentage Percentage Rank
W_pop_lore 1 40 4.33 5
S_brdcast_docummentary 2 20 0.03 38
S_conv 2 20 19.82 2
S_speech_scripted 2 20 0.16 26

128
 W_fict_prose x x 44.42 1

Table I4: Breakdown of genres the PV give up in Insight compared to the BNC (in percentages)

give up Insight Insight BNC BNC

DLC Type Rank Percentage Percentage Rank
W_pop_lore 1 50 8.54 5
S_brdcast_docummentary 2 12.5 0.15 28
S_brdcast_news 2 12.5 0.15 28
W_fict_prose 2 12.5 26.26 1
W_letters* 2 12.5 0.17 25

Table I5: Breakdown of genres the PV go out in Insight compared to the BNC (in percentages)

go out Insight Insight BNC BNC

DLC Type Rank Percentage Percentage Rank
S_interview 1 33.33 0.35 21
S_brdcast_docummentary 2 16.67 0.12 32
S_brdcast_discussn 2 16.67 1.41 12
W_fict_prose 2 16.67 29.78 1
W_pop_lore 2 16.67 5.26 5

Table I6: Breakdown of genres the PV grow up in Insight compared to the BNC (in percentages)

grow up Insight Insight BNC BNC

DLC Type Rank Percentage Percentage Rank
W_biography 1 50 6.91 7
S_brdcast_docummentary 2 16.67 0.13 28
S_interview 2 16.67 0.34 17
W_instructional 2 16.67 x x
W_fict_prose x x 23.66 1

Table I7: Breakdown of genres the PV pick up in Insight compared to the BNC (in percentages)

pick up Insight Insight BNC BNC

DLC Type Rank Percentage Percentage Rank
W_pop_lore 1 40 7.35 5
S_brdcast_docummentary 2 20 0.07 33
S_speech_scripted 2 20 0.11 29
W_fict_prose 2 20 37.99 1

Table I8: Breakdown of genres the PV put on in Insight compared to the BNC (in percentages)

put on Insight Insight BNC BNC

129
 DLC Type Rank Percentage Percentage Rank
W_pop_lore 1 66.67 5.68 4
W_fict_prose 2 16.67 26.99 2
W_letters* 2 16.67 0.04 32
S_conv x x 31.47 1

Table I9: Breakdown of genres the PV put up in Insight compared to the BNC (in percentages)

put up Insight Insight BNC BNC

DLC Type Rank Percentage Percentage Rank
S_conv 1 60 12.62 3
W_pop_lore 2 40 10.81 4
W_fict_prose x x 19.52 1

Table I10: Breakdown of genres the PV set up in Insight compared to the BNC (in percentages)

set up Insight Insight BNC BNC

DLC Type Rank Percentage Percentage Rank
S_interview 1 33.33 0.16 26
S_brdcast_docummentary 2 16.67 0.05 34
W_advert 2 16.67 0.19 25
W_essay* 2 16.67 0.21 23
W_pop_lore 2 16.67 9.86 5
W_non_ac* x x 21.63 1
W_ac* x x 14.28 2
W_newsp* x x 13.77 3

Table I11: Breakdown of genres the PV stand up in Insight compared to the BNC (in percentages)

stand up Insight Insight BNC BNC

DLC Type Rank Percentage Percentage Rank
W_pop_lore 1 60 3.45 7
W_newsp* 2 40 4.29 5
W_fict_prose x x 64.3 1

Table I12: Breakdown of genres the PV switch on in Insight compared to the BNC (in percentages)

switch on Insight Insight BNC BNC

DLC Type Rank Percentage Percentage Rank
S_speech_unscripted 1 80 0.32 17
S_conv 2 20 8.64 4
W_fict_prose x x 44.92 1

Table I13: Breakdown of genres the PV wake up in Insight compared to the BNC (in percentages)

130
 wake up Insight Insight BNC BNC
DLC Type Rank Percentage Percentage Rank
S_speech_scripted 1 33.33 x x
W_letters_* 2 33.33 0.06 25
W_instructional 3 16.67 0.13 20
W_pop_lore 3 16.67 6.88 6
W_fict_prose x x 41.31 1
S_conv x x 14.38 2
W_non_ac x x 9.44 3

131
Solutions

Table S1: Breakdown of genres the PV come in in Solutions compared to the BNC (in percentages)

come in Solutions Solutions BNC BNC

DLC Type Rank Percentage Percentage Rank
S_conv 1 60 15.31 2
S_interview 2 20 0.33 23
S_brdcast_discussn 2 20 2.08 11
W_fict_prose x x 34.57 1

Table S2: Breakdown of genres the PV find out in Solutions compared to the BNC (in percentages)

find out Solutions Solutions BNC BNC

DLC Type Rank Percentage Percentage Rank
W_pop_lore 1 33.33 8.34 4
S_interview 2 16.67 0.14 32
S_speech_scripted 2 16.67 0.13 34
S_interview_oral_history 2 16.67 0.97 17
W_fict_prose 2 16.67 30.88 1

Table S3: Breakdown of genres the PV give away in Solutions compared to the BNC (in percentages)

give away Solutions Solutions BNC BNC

DLC Type Rank Percentage Percentage Rank
W_pop_lore 1 100 13.90 3
W_fict_prose x x 24.55 1

Table S4: Breakdown of genres the PV go on in Solutions compared to the BNC (in percentages)

go on Solutions Solutions BNC BNC

DLC Type Rank Percentage Percentage Rank
S_consult 1 40 0.18 29

132
 S_conv 1 40 12.14 2
S_interview 3 20 0.22 26
W_fict_prose x x 36.92 1
W_newsp* x x 8.08 3
W_non_ac* x x 6.46 4

Table S5: Breakdown of genres the PV go out in Solutions compared to the BNC (in percentages)

go out Solutions Solutions BNC BNC

DLC Type Rank Percentage Percentage Rank
S_conv 1 57.14 18.99 2
W_fict_prose 2 21.43 29.78 1
W_letters* 3 14.23 0.12 32
S_interview_oral_history 4 7.14 4.25 7

Table S6: Breakdown of genres the PV sit down in Solutions compared to the BNC (in percentages)

sit down Solutions Solutions BNC BNC

DLC Type Rank Percentage Percentage Rank
W_fict_prose 1 40 59.11 1
S_interview 2 20 0.27 19
S_consult 2 20 0.07 30
S_conv 2 20 10.60 2

Table S6: Breakdown of genres the PV work out in Solutions compared to the BNC (in percentages)

work out Solutions Solutions BNC BNC

DLC Type Rank Percentage Percentage Rank
W_pop_lore 1 80 9.31 4
W_advert 2 20 0.75 19
W_fict_prose x x 16.71 1

133