Communications in Humanities Research ISSN: 2753-7072
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Research Article

Formal and Semantic Features of Creative Phrasal Verbs in Native Speakers' Personal Storytelling: A Corpus-Driven Study

Ruiyuan WangCatholic University of Louvain*

* Corresponding author: [email protected]

Abstract

Most research on linguistic creativity has focused on learners' language use, and creative language use by native speakers, especially in the area of phrasal verbs, has been relatively unexplored. Corpus-driven study of creative phrasal verbs in personal storytelling and an operational definition of creative phrasal verbs: verb-particle constructions that are both unattested in a reference corpus and unarchived in existing phrasal verb dictionaries. A self-compiled corpus of personal stories from The Moth was used to extract phrasal verbs via Corpus Query Language (CQL) searches and then further identified by automated comparison in R. The results show that creative phrasal verbs occur less frequently in personal stories. Most examples are intransitive, particle-inseparable (i.e., VPO/VP structure), and structurally simple (i.e., non-phrasal-prepositional construction), and are more literal than metaphorical in semantics. Some semantic patterns are the same as those in older studies of traditional phrasal verbs, for example, particle redundancy. The study has the following deficiencies: a small corpus size, a descriptive design, a single-rater pattern, an issue with a less comparable reference corpus, and limited extraction criteria. In the future, a large number of various corpora will be used to conduct cross-register comparisons and incorporate diachronic corpus updates for an all-encompassing study of creative language use. Besides, a linguistic comparison between the use of creative and existing phrasal verbs by native speakers, and the statistical predictive power of factors on the semantic findings of this study will be conducted and investigated in the future.

Keywords: phrasal verbs; linguistic creativity; personal storytelling; corpus linguistics; native speakers
Published: September 8, 2026
DOI: 10.54254/2753-7064/2026.HT36579
Volume: CHR Vol.115
pp. 57-66
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