This article provides an analysis of the frequency of verbs and their syntactic
requirements in Interchange (Richards et al., 1991), a popular
series of textbooks for English as a second language (ESL). Current theoretical
approaches to verb classes permit a fine-grained crosslinguistic description of
differences in semantics-syntax correspondences for verbs; in this article,
transitive verbs are split into five subcategories and intransitives are split into
two categories. A corpus analysis of Interchange suggests that ESL
materials may under-represent some of the verb classes that are known to cause
learners difficulty. These findings suggest that weak contrastive analysis and a
more careful consideration of syntactic properties of verbs could be useful to
teachers and materials writers.
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