A Corpus-based Analysis of the Phraseological Patterns and Frequency of Lexical Verbs in Nigerian and British Englishes

This study presents a quantitative corpus-based comparison of phrasal verb usage in Nigerian and British Englishes, using data from the International Corpus of English (ICE-Nigeria and ICE-Great Britain). The analysis is against the backdrop that Nigerian English users underuse or avoid phrasal verbs; thereby examining their frequency and distribution across modes and structural patterns. A predefined list of 100 most frequent phrasal verbs as given by Gradner and Davis (2007) guided systematic concordance searches with manual validation to ensure semantic unity. Results indicate higher overall phrasal verb frequency in British English (3,012 tokens) than in Nigerian English (2,218 tokens). However, the Nigerian data demonstrates substantial and consistent usage. In both corpora, phrasal verbs occur predominantly in spoken discourse (ICE-GB: 70.6%; ICE-Nig.: 68.5%), confirming strong register sensitivity. Structurally, literal phrasal verbs are more frequent than literal/idiomatic forms in both varieties, with British English showing marginally higher idiomatic usage. High-frequency items such as go on and set up appear in both corpora, indicating shared core phraseological foundation. Overall, quantitative evidence suggests that observed differences reflect systematic varietal preferences rather than avoidance or deficiency, supporting a descriptive account of Nigerian English within the World Englishes paradigm.