Phrasal Verbs (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9783639037227)

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

Author: Birgit Waibel
ISBN-10: 3639037227
ISBN-13: 9783639037227
Publisher: VDM Verlag Dr. Mueller E.K.
Language: English
Published: 06/04/2008
Pages: 212
Format: Paperback
Weight: 0.64lbs
Size: 9.00h x 6.00w x 0.45d