Resumen de Formality in academic writing: The use/non-use of phrasalverbs in two varieties of English
Phrasal verbs are characteristic of colloquial or informal language and tend to occurmore in conversational speech genres than in academic discourse. Using a singleLatinate verb instead of a phrasal verb is recommended by some EAP practitioners inthe West in order to achieve a more formal tone in academic writing. How universalis this prescriptive notion? Does it apply to varieties of English that have developedtheir ‘own’, semantically unique, phrasal verbs? The distribution of phrasal verbs in acorpus of Sri Lankan English writing is investigated and compared to a similarcorpus of British English in order to answer this question.
