High frequency verbs constitute a good starting-point to analyse phraseology in FLL for the following reasons:

• they display the whole gammut of phraseological constraints and have a very high rate of restricted and idiomatic uses. While the verb + noun combinations investigated by Howarth (1996) display an average percentage of 40% of restricted collocations and idioms, this proportion rises to 69% for give, 73% for take and 95% for make.
• they play an essential role in L1 and L2 vocabulary acquisition: they are learnt early and tend to be overused by learners, even at an advanced proficiency level (Hasselgren 1994 refers to them as ‘lexical teddy bears’).
• they constitute a frequent source of error (Bahns 1993, Lennon 1996, Viberg 1998). Källkvist’s (1998) study shows that verbs are used infelicitously about twice as frequently as nouns.
• they have near-equivalents in many languages, which leads learners to overextend their use, a tendency which is reinforced when semantic similarity is coupled with formal similarity (cognates).
• they are taught early and tend to be neglected in the later teaching stages because teachers are more preoccupied with increasing the learners’ word store than «to flesh out the incomplete or 'skeleton' entries which even advanced learners may have for high-frequency verbs" (Lennon 1996: 23).
  

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