A List of Opaque Prepositional Expressions for EFL Undergraduates

Abstract

The purpose of this paper was toe stablish a list of the most frequent semantically non-compositional prepositional expressions for EFL undergraduates, who need to read English academic texts in their fields of study. Made up of a preposition and a noun phrase, prepositional expressions usually function as an adjective or adverb. In this research, high-frequency prepositional expressions were retrieved from the 112 million-word academic section of the 560-million-token Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA), which contains approximately 100 academic magazines and journals. In consideration of widespread use, the researcher applied a series of selection criteria (viz. frequency, meaningfulness, well-formedness and non-compositionality), while compiling the list. A total of 220 semantically non-compositional prepositional phrases of 2 to 5 words were chosen and they accounted for 1.02% of the total words in the COCA-academic. As with other individual wordlists, this prepositional expressions list may serve as a reference for English for General Purposes as well as English for Academic Purposes syllabi.