This study investigates a certain set of semantically categorized verbs, namely Communication Verbs (CV) (Biber, 2006) in learner language. Communication verbs are "a special subcategory of activity verbs that involve communication activities " (2006, p. 247) and they are relatively common both in written and spoken discourse. Two corpora, LOCNESS and TICLE, were analysed to reveal frequencies of these verbs in both corpora and the findings showed that though priming of most frequent verbs in each corpus are identical, Turkish EFL learners significantly underused such verbs in their argumentative essays. In-depth analysis additionally signified distinctive grammatical patterns as well as various semantic frames of nouns collocated with verbs selected in TICLE. Finally, based on the findings, usage based differences were examined and the reasons why learners might have used particular patterns in comparison to the ones used by NSs, were suggested by making references to Hunston and Francis's Pattern Grammar (2000).

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