The Phrasal-Prepositional Verbs in Philippine English: A Corpus-based Analysis

摘要

The study determines the most common forms of phrasal-prepositional verbs (PPVs) in Philippine English using the ICE-PHI and describes their syntactic and semantic features, following Quirk et al.'s (1985) framework. Thirty nine out of the forty-eight words from the list of Quirk et al. (1985) and Biber et al. (1999) were found in the corpus using AntConc 3.4. Results show that come up with, get out of, look forward to, come out with, hold on to, and catch up with are the most frequently used PPVs by Filipinos. These PPVs occur in active voice. They are intransitive verbs and are also inseparable. Findings further reveal that the meanings of the PPVs are the same as the single-word verb meanings provided by the online dictionaries of phrasal verbs, and those single-word verb meanings can replace the PPVs. Hence, they are idiomatic. The study implies that Filipinos use minimal number of PPVs. They appear to be conservative in their choice of PPV structure, but generally show proficiency in using PPVs in their utterances.