How to find phrasal verbs in a corpus?

    With most phrasal verbs, the only way to tell phrasal verbs from ordinary verbs is to understand the meaning of the whole sentence or the context of the communication.
    'go down' in these sentences can be a phrasal verb or an ordinary verb. It is the context that decides:
    ‣ It is normal for prices to go down and then up. (=increase)
    ‣ Large pills may not go down easily. (= swallow)
    ‣ The road goes down and then up again.
    ‣ When you press this button, the lift goes down.

    There is no way to set search conditions using lemmas, part-of-speech tags or other criteria that would only find the first two and not the last two. Searching for verb + adverb or verb + preposition would find both.
    Sketch Engine would need to understand the meaning of the sentence or the whole document to be able to distinguish phrasal verbs and ordinary verbs. Such technologies might be possible but have not been developed sufficiently to be integrated in Sketch Engine. 

    The only solution would be a corpus where phrasal verbs have been manually annotated. Corpora built by Sketch Engine cannot be annotated manually because of their size. It is not viable to manually annotate billions of words.
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