The Impact of the Potential Determinants on the Use of English Polysemantic Phrasal Verbs Among Iranian Trilingual Learners

This study explores the Iranian trilingual EFL learners' receptive and productive knowledge of the most frequent polysemantic phrasal verbs and the role of some potential factors in this knowledge. To this end, ۱۰۳ participants took a test of vocabulary, a productive gap-fill test of phrasal verbs, a receptive phrasal verb test, and a questionnaire of exposure to English input. Moreover, ۲۵ of the participants attended a semi-structured interview about their perceptions of the use of phrasal verbs. The results of the PV tests revealed that the participants knew about ۶۷% of the target phrasal verbs receptively and about ۴۰% of the same phrasal verb meaning productively. Exposure to English input, level of language proficiency, and entrenchment were found to be at play in the participants' both receptive and productive knowledge of polysemantic phrasal verbs. Semantic compositionality, however, was effective only on the participants' receptive knowledge of the target phrasal verb meaning senses, while raw and sense-based COCA frequency and entrenchment did not play a role in the EFL learners' productive and receptive phrasal verb knowledge. Moreover, no meaningful difference was found between the participants' gender and their productive and receptive knowledge of phrasal verbs. Finally, the responses to the interview revealed that most of the respondents are aware of the importance of learning and using phrasal verbs and the significant role of exposure in their knowledge of phrasal verbs.