Distribution and Use of Phrasal Verbs in a Grade I ESL Textbook

Abstract

The present paper delves into the distribution and uses of English phrasal verbs as well as their syntactic and semantic representation in the grade-1 ESL textbook published by the National Council of Educational Research and Training (NCERT) of India prescribed for the academic curriculum programme. The identified phrasal verbs are then compared with the list of 150 most frequent phrasal verbs in the British National Corpus (BNC) and The Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA) (Liu, 2011) and the constituent elements of EPVs (i.e. a verb and a particle) are also compared with the list of top 20 most frequent lexical verb lemmas and 16 most frequent particles functioning as phrasal verb forms in the British National Corpus (BNC) (Gardner & Davies, 2007) respectively.  The study found that the particles denote their literal senses and contribute to the formation of compositional or literal meanings. This study does not reflect the most frequent phrasal verbs found in the various genres of the BNC and COCA. Lexical verbs are mostly verbs of motion, and particles belonging to the group of spatial orientation are presented in the grade-1- ESL textbook.  Most of the phrasal verbs are presented in its literal sense. Very few present idiomatic/figurative/ extended meanings. However, the aspectual phrasal verbs are absent in the grade-1 ESL textbook.