A CORPUS STUDY ON BRAZILIAN LEARNERS` USAGE OF ENGLISH PHRASAL VERBS

Resumo

The present study attempts at using corpora to determine if the most common phrasal verbs used by Brazilian learners of English are the same as the most commonly used by native speakers; whether there is evidence of avoidance of phrasal verb usage by learners in Brazil; and finally if the most common meanings used by Brazilian learners match the most common meanings found in native-speaker language. The tools used for this research were a Brazilian learner corpus called CoMAprend and the toolkit AntConc. Results showed that there was significant avoidance of phrasal verb usage by the learners and that a large number of phrasal verbs found in the corpus was not within the group of most common phrasal verbs native speakers use. In spite of this a good part of the phrasal verbs` meanings appearing in the learner corpus were listed as the most usual in the Bank of English.