WHY UZBEK LEARNERS AVOID ENGLISH PHRASAL VERBS: A TYPOLOGICAL EXPLANATION AND TEACHING IMPLICATIONS

English phrasal verbs such as find out, give up and put off are frequent in everyday English but are often avoided by learners, who prefer one-word equivalents such as discover, quit and postpone. Studies of Hebrew-, Swedish- and Chinese-speaking learners have explained avoidance through first-language differences, semantic complexity and proficiency. Uzbek learners have received little attention in this research, although local work has examined the translation of phrasal verbs into Uzbek. This article offers a typological explanation. Following Talmy, English is a satellite-framed language that typically expresses path of motion in a particle (go out, run away), while Uzbek, like other Turkic languages, is largely verb-framed, expressing path in the main verb (chiqmoq, qochmoq) and using converb-plus-auxiliary constructions (chiqib ketmoq) for aspect and manner. This difference, together with the figurative meanings of many phrasal verbs, predicts avoidance. The article then proposes a three-stage teaching sequence based on frequency, literal-to-figurative meaning extension and particle meanings.