This paper looks at the phrasal verbs get through, get along, and get by in the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA). It attempts to explain how their non-literal meanings are created through combinations of metaphor and metonymy - and shows that different senses of the same phrasal verbs, especially the rigid forms, can have different degrees of metaphoricity. This study shows that phrasal verbs with the same verbal component can have different meanings, depending on the meaning of the particle and on the semantics of the collocates the phrasal verb is used with. The discussion suggests that a combination of corpus search and analysis based on the semantics of prepositions should be used to define the processes of generating the metaphoricity of phrasal verbs.