Cooper, Patricia Anne2025-02-192025-02-192025-05-142024-10*A2025http://hdl.handle.net/2263/101047Thesis (PhD (Linguistics))--University of Pretoria, 2024.Global research into phrasal verb use suggests that second-language students struggle to attain competence in its use although it is prevalent in English and so key to English proficiency. The phrasal verb is a multi-part verb consisting of a verb proper and particle. This research study set out to discover whether this trend was also observable among South African second-language students, and, furthermore, to examine the general patterns of phrasal verb use by South African students, including first-language students. Two corpora, SAMuLCAT (comprising student writing samples from North-West University and the University of Pretoria) and WITS (comprising student writing samples from the University of the Witwatersrand) were used in the study, separated into first- and second-language subcorpora. Phrasal verb use was approached from various angles to gain a detailed perspective on this grammatical feature. Investigation centred around phrasal verb occurrence and distribution, frequently used phrasal verbs, preference for phrasal verbs or their one-word synonyms, and phrasal verb error occurrence. The results showed that second-language students use phrasal verbs more than first-language students, and that first-language students prefer one-word synonyms more than second-language students. Many high-frequency phrasal verbs were used by both groups of students. Phrasal verb distribution showed that a small percentage of phrasal verbs was used often, while the rest were used once only. More unnatural PV use was found in second-language than in first-language student writing which suggests that L2 students in particular would benefit from workshops on the appropriate use of phrasal verbs and their one-word alternatives.en© 2023 University of Pretoria. All rights reserved. The copyright in this work vests in the University of Pretoria. No part of this work may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, without the prior written permission of the University of Pretoria.UCTDSustainable Development Goals (SDGs)Phrasal verbsOne-word alternative verbsStudent academic writingCorpus linguisticsThesisu04181956Disclaimer Letter