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Topics in English Linguistics

78

Editors

Elizabeth Closs Traugott

Bernd Kortmann

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Phrasal Verbs

The English Verb-Particle Construction

and its History

by

Stefan Thim

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(originally submitted under the title “Phrasal verbs in transition: a diachronic and comparative study of the English verb-particle construction”)

ISBN 978-3-11-025702-1 e-ISBN 978-3-11-025703-8 ISSN 1434-3452

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

A CIP catalog record for this book has been applied for at the Library of Congress.

Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek

The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available in the Internet at http://dnb.dnb.de.

” 2012 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston Printing: Hubert & Co. GmbH & Co. KG, Göttingen 앪앝 Printed on acid-free paper

Printed in Germany www.degruyter.com

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This book is the published version of my doctoral dissertation at the Friedrich-Alexander-Universität, Erlangen (2009). I am greatly indebted to Angelika Lutz, my Doktormutter, for her invaluable criticism, advice and encouragement throughout the writing of the dissertation. For various kinds of professional support I also wish to thank Minoji Akimoto, Renate Bauer, Hartmut Burmeister, Claudia Claridge, David Denison, Klaus Dietz, Philip Durkin, Marion Elenbaas, Teresa Fanego, Mechthild Habermann, Thomas Herbst, Andrew James Johnston, Dieter Kastovsky, Lucia Kornexl, Svenja Kranich, Bettelou Los, Robert Mailhammer, Ferdinand von Mengden, Donka Minkova, Horst Haider Munske, Eva-Maria Remberger, Hans Sauer, Herbert Schendl, Hildegard L.C. Tristram, Theo Vennemann, Ilse Wischer and Nuria Yáñez-Bouza. During the very early phase of the dis-sertation I stayed as a visiting scholar at the Research Unit for Variation and Change in English at Helsinki University, and I would like to thank Terttu Nevalainen and her colleagues, especially Arja Nurmi, Helena Raumolin-Brunberg and Matti Rissanen. I gratefully acknowledge funding for the stay from the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD). Elizabeth Traugott has been a marvellous editor, who deserves the highest praise for the feedback she has provided. All remaining errors are of course mine. And last, but by no means least, I thank my family and friends for putting up with me for all the years, and for their love and support.

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Contents

Acknowledgments v List of figures x List of tables xi Abbreviations xii 1. Introduction 1 1.1. Aims 1

1.2. The term phrasal verb 2

1.3. Contrast, comparison, history 3

1.4. Structure of this study 8

2. Present-day English and other Germanic languages 10

2.1. Phrasal verbs: some examples 10

2.2. Semantic characteristics 11

2.2.1. Three semantic types 13

2.2.2. Compositional constructions 14

2.2.3. Aspectual constructions 16

2.2.4. Idiomatic constructions 19

2.3. Syntactic characteristics 20

2.3.1. Transitivity and serialization 21

2.3.2. Particles and prepositions 26

2.3.3. Phrasal-prepositional verbs 28

2.4. Further observations 30

2.4.1. Cranberry verbs 30

2.4.2. Nominalisations 30

2.4.3. Other word formations 34

2.4.4. Prefix verbs and phrasal verbs 34

2.4.5. ‘Group-verbs’ etc. 36

2.4.6. Replaceability by a simple verb 40

2.4.7. Variation and style 42

2.5. Verb-particle constructions in other present-day

Germanic languages 45

2.5.1. Basic word order 47

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2.6. Phrasal verbs as periphrastic word formations 55

2.6.1. Verbs plus particles? 56

2.6.2. Periphrastic word formation 62

2.6.3. Further pros and cons 67

2.6.4. Phrasal verbs as constructions 69

2.7. Conclusion 72

3. The development of postposed particles 74

3.1. Preverbs 75

3.1.1. Preverbs in non-Indo-European languages 78

3.1.2. Preverbs in Indo-European 81

3.2. The development of English word order 89

3.2.1. Word order in earlier Germanic 89

3.2.2. Word order in Old English 93

3.2.3. The rise of Modern English word order 100

3.3. The position of the particle in medieval English 103

3.4. Conclusion 115

4. Writing the history of the phrasal verb 117

4.1. A classic study: Kennedy (1920) 117

4.1.1. The ‘rise’ of the phrasal verb 118

4.1.2. Colloquiality, informality, nativeness 120

4.1.3. The impact of Kennedy’s study 123

4.2. Some textbooks and language histories 124

4.2.1. The pitfalls of history 124

4.2.2. Coverage in CHEL I and II 126

4.3. Lexicographic coverage: a characteristic example 131 4.3.1. Bosworth–Toller and other older dictionaries 132

4.3.2. The Middle English Dictionary 135

4.3.3. The Oxford English Dictionary 138

4.3.4. The Dictionary of Old English 140

4.3.5. Concluding remarks on the historical dictionaries 143

4.4. Conclusion 143

5. Word formation, sound change and semantics 145

5.1. Changing prefix inventories in English 145

5.1.1. The Old English prefixes 146

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5.2. Preverbs and particles in medieval English 158

5.2.1. On sound change and word formation 158

5.2.2. Some comparative evidence 165

5.2.3. Prefix variation in Old English 171

5.2.4. Particle semantics in medieval English 176

5.2.5. Some conclusions 183

5.3. An outlook to modern English 185

5.3.1. Etymology and integration 185

5.3.2. Phrasal verbs in 15th- and 16th-century English 192

5.4. Conclusion 195

6. Frequency, style and attitudes 197

6.1. Counting phrasal verbs 197

6.1.1. Quantitative long-term developments from

Middle English to the 20th century 197

6.1.2. Early Modern English frequencies 205

6.1.3. Relative frequencies of particles 210

6.1.4. Quantitative long-term developments 211

6.2. Style and attitudes 214

6.2.1. Text type and frequency 215

6.2.2. Pre-1800 evidence for colloquiality? 218

6.2.3. An example: Samuel Johnson 221

6.2.4. James Cook rewritten and John Dryden revised 226 6.3. The colloquialization conspiracy: a first suggestion 233

6.4. Conclusion 245 7. Conclusion 247 7.1. Summary 247 7.2. Outlook 252 References 255 Index 293

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Figure 2-1 Semantic classification of phrasal verbs 13

Figure 2-2 Subtypes of complex predicates 65

Figure 2-3 The transitive verb-particle construction with its

two allostructions 72

Figure 3-1 Paths of adpositions and preverbs 88

Figure 3-2 Positional changes and their causes 104

Figure 3-3 Development of the order ‘verb-particle’ from

early Old English to late Middle English 112 Figure 5-1 Semantic development of verb-particle

constructions 183 Figure 5-2 Etymologies of phrasal verbs (types) in English

letters, 1450–1600 193

Figure 6-1 Development of phrasal verbs (Konishi 1958) 199 Figure 6-2 Phrasal verbs in English plays (Spasov 1966) 201 Figure 6-3 Development of phrasal verbs, 1640–1740 206

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Table 2-1 Phrasal verbs and prepositional verbs compared 27

Table 2-2 Group-verbs in present-day English 37

Table 3-1 Word order in early West Saxon 97

Table 3-2 OV and VO orders in English 101

Table 5-1 Old English verb prefixes and their etymologies 151

Table 5-2 Old English verb prefixes: overview 152

Table 5-3 Modern English verb prefixes 154

Table 6-1 Phrasal verbs in two corpora 209

Table 6-2 Phrasal verbs in the Corpus of Early English

Correspondence 210 Table 6-3 Phrasal verbs per 1,000 words in three corpora 210

Table 6-4 Relative frequencies of particles in three corpora 211 Table 6-5 Frequencies of phrasal verbs in nine corpora 213

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Abbreviations

Short titles of editions

For full bibliographic information on editions used see the list of references at the end of the book. Where examples are retrieved from the Dictionary

of Old English (DOE) or the Dictionary of Old English Corpus, the

refer-ences follow the DOE conventions.

ÆCHom I = Ælfric’s Catholic Homilies: The first series (Clemoes 1997) ÆCHom II = Ælfric’s Catholic Homilies: The second series (Godden 1979) ÆHom = Homilies of Ælfric: A supplementary collection (Pope 1967–68) ÆLS = Ælfric’s Lives of the Saints (Skeat 1881–1900 [1966])

Ancient Laws (Thorpe) (Thorpe 1840)

Ancr (Nero) = The English Text of the Ancrene Riwle (Day 1952) ApT = The Old English Apollonius of Tyre (Goolden 1958)

AV = The Authorised Version of the English Bible 1611 (Wright 1909) Bede = The Old English Version of Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of the

English People (Miller 1890–1898) Beowulf (Dobbie 1953)

BlHom = The Blickling Homilies (Morris 1874–1880 [1967])

Chaucer (Benson 1988) [GP = General Prologue; Mel = The Tale of Melibee; MT = The Miller’s Tale]

ChronA = The Parker Chronicle (Plummer 1892–1899 [cf. Bately 1986]) ChronE = The Peterborough Chronicle (Plummer 1892–1899 [cf. Irvine

2004])

ChronF = The Domitian Bilingual (Dumville 1995)

CP = King Alfred’s West Saxon Version of Gregory’s Pastoral Care (Sweet

1871)

Ex = Exodus (Krapp 1931)

GD = The Old English Translation of Gregory’s Dialogues (Hecht 1900–

1907)

Gospels = The Old English Version of the Gospels (Liuzza 1994)

Herbarium = The Old English Herbarium and Medicina de Quadrupedibus

(de Vriend 1986)

LawIne = Ine’s Laws (Liebermann 1903)

LS 5 (InventCrossNap) = Invention of the Cross (Napier 1894) Mk = Mark (CCCC 140) in The Four Gospels in Anglo-Saxon,

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MtGl (Ru) = Matthew (MS Rushworth) in The Holy Gospels in Anglo-Saxon, Northumbrian, and Old Mercian Versions (Skeat 1871–1887) Or = The Old English Orosius (Bately 1980)

PsGlG (Rosier) = The Vitellius Psalter (Rosier 1962)

St Marg = Seinte Marherete: Þe Meiden ant Martyr (Mack 1934) Tatian (Sievers 1892)

T-Chron [B and F] = The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle (Thorpe 1861 [cf. Taylor 1983 and Dumville 1995])

WHom = The Homilies of Wulfstan (Bethurum 1957)

Wulfila = Die Gotische Bibel (Streitberg 2000 [1919])

Grammatical abbreviations

Grammatical category labels in interlinear morphological glosses are printed in small capitals (‘GEN’for ‘genitive’, etc.). The interlinear glosses follow the Leipzig Glossing Rules and provide relevant structural infor-mation rather than complete morphological descriptions.

* ungrammatical /

unattested

? acceptability doubtful

1,2,3 first, second, third person abl ablative acc accusative adv adverb art article aux auxiliary comp complementizer cop copula dat dative dem demonstrative det determiner fem feminine gen genitive imp imperative inf infinitive int interrogative N noun

neg negation, negative

nom nominative NP noun phrase O object part partitive perf perfect pl plural pres present pret preterite prt particle pst past ptcp participle rel relativizer S subject sg singular subj subjunctive trans transitive V verb V-1 verb first V-2 verb second V-3 verb third V-F verb final VP verb phrase

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Data from the British National Corpus (BNC)

Data cited in this study have been extracted from the British National Corpus (version 3, 2007, <http://www.natcorp.ox.ac.uk/>), distributed by Oxford University Computing Services on behalf of the BNC Consortium. All rights in the texts cited are reserved.

Quotations taken from the BNC are followed by the text identifier and the sentence number (e.g. Eke out the little pleasures.A5X_39).

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Chapter 1

Introduction

1.1. Aims

Phrasal verbs have long been regarded as being among the most character-istic features of the English language. As early as 1712, Michael Mattaire in his English Grammar described the basic syntactic peculiarities of the English verb-particle construction. A few decades later Samuel Johnson and Robert Lowth – one the most influential lexicographer and the other the most influential grammarian of the 18th century – directed their atten-tion to the phrasal verb. Johnson writes in the Preface to A Dicatten-tionary of

the English Language (1755):

There is another kind of composition more frequent in our language than per-haps in any other, from which arises to foreigners the greatest difficulty. We modify the signification of many verbs by a particle subjoined; as to come off, to escape by a fetch; to fall on, to attack; to fall off, to apostatize; to break off, to stop abruptly; to bear out, to justify; to fall in, to comply; to give over, to cease; to set off, to embellish; to set in, to begin a continual tenour; to set out, to begin a course or journey; to take off, to copy; with innumerable expressions of the same kind, of which some appear wildly irregular, being so far distant from the sense of the simple words, that no sagacity will be able to trace the steps by which they arrived at the present use. (Johnson 1755: n.pag.)

Thus, while the term phrasal verb appears to be a coinage of the first half of the 20th century, the construction itself has attracted linguistic attention for the last 300 years or so.

In the 20th century phrasal verbs came to be one of the favourite topics not only of grammarians and lexicographers, but also of authors of popular style guides; only few properties of English are commonly seen as more typical of the language than the phrasal verb. The above quotation from the Preface to Johnson’s dictionary shows that this view goes back at least to the middle of the 18th century, when many of the modern notions con-cerning the distinctive properties of the English language were first ex-pressed. So powerful have these notions been that one obvious question has in fact rarely been asked, namely: how ‘English’ are the phrasal verbs really? One aim of the present study is to explore this question. The other aim is to trace the evolution of the Modern English phrasal verb from its early history up to the present. Obviously, both aims are closely connected,

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since the peculiarities of the Modern English construction are bound to re-main indistinct unless one is ready to adopt a historical, contrastive and cross-linguistic perspective.

The dichotomy of synchrony vs. diachrony has led to deplorable limita-tions of linguistic interests and insights throughout much of the 20th century. Over the past years, the traditional dichotomy has been trans-cended by a large body of usage-based functionalist, variationist and typological research, whose stance has been summed up by Bybee (2010: 104) as follows: “Language change is not just a peripheral phenomenon that can be tacked on to a synchronic theory; synchrony and diachrony have to be viewed as an integrated whole”. Thus the wide scope of the present study does not exclude the language of today, which I regard as essentially situated in a historical variational space (see e.g. Oesterreicher 2001 and the references provided there). In the following chapters a description of the main characteristics of the verb-particle construction in present-day English will be taken as a starting point from whence the development of its struc-tural properties will be sketched in the light of previous research and of traditional attitudes. I have come to believe that many of the problems of analysis which have beset the discussion of phrasal verbs for a long time are best solved within a constructional framework, not least if historical developments are to be accounted for as well; the present study is decidedly functionalist (cf. e.g. Dik 1997, Traugott 2003a, Croft 2006, Fischer 2007, Haspelmath 2008 and 2010, Bybee 2010 and Smirnova & Mortelmans 2010). But evidence from studies adhering to other linguistic persuasions will be taken into account wherever this is appropriate for the discussion at hand. Recent monographs containing discussions of various aspects of the phrasal verbs include Claridge (2000), Dehé (2002), Hampe (2002), Gries (2003), Cappelle (2005), Elenbaas (2007), Waibel (2007) and Matsumoto (2008). Bacchielli (1999) and Dehé (2003–) provide select bibliographies.

1.2. The term phrasal verb

The term phrasal verb is rarely ever used except with respect to English, where it is sometimes applied not only to phrasal verbs as described by Samuel Johnson in the quotation at the beginning of this introduction, but also to other verbal constructs, most notably prepositional verbs (cf. the discussion below, Chapter 2.3.2). It seems that the term was originally coined with respect to English alone and it is probably first found in Smith (1925), where it is attributed to one of the editors of the OED, Henry Bradley (1845–1923):

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The term ‘phrasal verb’ was suggested to me by the late Dr. Bradley; not, as he wrote, that he was satisfied with it, or would not welcome any alternative that he could feel to be an improvement. But, as he said, one cannot write of these verbs without some workable description; and although the word ‘phrasal’ is perhaps objectionable in formation, it fills a want, and is sometimes indispen-sable. (Smith 1925: 172, fn.1)

Characteristically, the term is introduced in a chapter on ‘English idioms’, where Smith calls the phrasal verbs “one of the most striking idiosyncrasies of our language”, despite adding the observation that they “correspond to the compound verbs in synthetic languages” (Smith 1925: 172).

But the type of construction discussed in the present study also goes by a rather large number of other names. This is ultimately due to the fact that it straddles the conventional boundary of morphology and syntax and that it has no place in Latin school grammar. Consequently, there is no traditional term for it. Together with the tendency in linguistics to coin new termi-nology this has led to a plethora of designations, e.g. verb-adverb

combination, particle verb, verb-particle combination, verb-particle con-struction, discontinuous verb, merged verb, separable verb, two-word verb, separable compound, poly-word verb, etc. (cf. the long list provided by

Carstensen 1964: 306–308). Of course, the choice of terminology often re-flects theoretical preferences, or characteristic features of the authors’ linguistic classifications. For a long time the interest in the history of phrasal verbs was a rather marginal area, though, and most studies have tended to concentrate on a small number of topics. Thus, so far some points – like the relative position of verb and particle in Old English – have received a lot of attention, while others have received considerably less attention. The first major study of the Modern English phrasal verb and its history is a short monograph by Kennedy (1920) on the ‘verb-adverb combination’, although in retrospect Harrison’s (1892) study of ‘separable prefixes’ in Old English can perhaps be taken to mark the beginning of the diachronic research tradition in English historical linguistics.

1.3. Contrast, comparison, history

Although from the very beginning the use of the term phrasal verb implies that the construction is distinctively English, there are comparable verbal constructions in other languages, as already noted by Smith (1925). The most obvious parallels can be found in other Germanic languages. Cf. e.g. present-day German aufgeben ‘give up’, which, like its English translation,

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consists of a particle (auf, cognate to up) and a verb (geben, cognate to

give):

(1) Present-day German

Alexander gab das Cellospielen auf Alexander gave the cello:playing up

‘Alexander gave up playing the cello.’

But neither syntactically nor semantically are there always one-to-one cor-respondences. Cf. e.g. the German verb aufmachen ‘open’ (particle auf and verb machen, cognate to make) in the following example:

(2) Present-day German

Wenzel sagt dass Eva die Tür aufmachen wird Wenzel says COMP Eva the door up:make:INF AUX:3SG ‘Wenzel says that Eva will open the door.’

In the modern Germanic languages the distribution of pre- and postposition of the particle is entirely rule-governed. In those Germanic languages where the particle may either follow the verb as in the first example or pre-cede the verb as in the second example it has long been customary to call such particle verbs separable prefix verbs, a term which obviously cannot be applied to present-day English, where the particle is always separated and behind the verb. In studies with a comparative focus the more neutral term particle verb (or verb-particle construction) is now well-established. Consequently, in this study this term will be used from a comparative and contrastive point of view, while the term phrasal verb will be reserved for the Modern English verb-particle construction and its peculiarities, espe-cially where the discussion is restricted to English.

In Old English, the particle may occur before or after the verb, as in the present-day Continental West Germanic languages, where the alternation between pre- and postposed particles has been historically more stable than in English. Cf. the repeated use of Old English ut-gan ‘go out’ in the fol-lowing example (note that eod- is the regular suppletive preterite of gan ‘go’ in Old English):

(3) Old English (ÆCHom II, 1 [012700 (10.256)f.])

Gað ut of ðam ofne and cumað to me

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Hi ðærrihte ut eodon they immediately out go;PRET:PL

‘Come out of the oven and come to me; they immediately came out.’ Thus the primary syntactic development in the English construction is one towards almost exceptionless postposition of the particles. And while many details of the development have not been fully explained, there is now gen-eral agreement that this development is connected to the changes in the basic word order in the history of English. But the normally post-verbal position of the particle in present-day English also has close correspon-dences in other present-day Germanic languages. Taken together, such parallels in a group of genetically related languages can be regarded as a clear indication of common historical origins. Although shared features may in principle also be the result of convergence and contact, in the pre-sent case common ancestry is the only viable explanation.

Similarly, the semantic properties of the particle verbs in the various present-day Germanic languages are very much alike. However, in this respect in all the languages the modern stages differ significantly from their earliest stages, where typically compositional combinations of verbs of motion and spatial particles are found, e.g. Old English forþfēran (literally: ‘travel/move away or by’):

(4) Old English (LS 5 (InventCrossNap) [53])

& ferde forþ on his weig and went forth on his way

‘and went forth on his way’

Although the non-spatial and non-compositional combinations are slower to emerge, they are also already found in Old English. Thus forþfēran is frequently found in the figurative sense ‘die’:

(5) Old English (LawIne [38])

& fere se ceorl forð and go:PRES.SUBJ.SG the man forth

‘and if the man dies’

Cf. the semantically corresponding phrasal verb pass away in present-day English. This is of course an instance of the readily intelligible and cross-linguistically wide-spread metaphor ‘life is a journey’ (cf. e.g. Lakoff 1993 and the overview in Croft & Cruse 2004: Ch. 8, with further references), used euphemistically. In fact, all non-literal senses of the verb-particle

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constructions may be reasonably assumed to have developed out of such metaphorical (or metonymical) uses. The observation that forþgān with its equivalent literal meaning ‘go forth’ does not seem to be used in the sense ‘die’ suggests that this metaphorical use of forþfēran is lexicalized in Old English (note that forþgān in its turn is also used as a gloss of Latin

pro-cedere, progredi, praeterire, etc.); cf. DOE s.vv. forþ and forþ-gān.

The particle in Old English may either precede or follow the verb, cf. example (3) above. In general, this is entirely independent of the meaning of the Old English verb-particle construction, as a comparison of the fol-lowing two examples to the preceding examples (4) and (5) shows:

(6) Old English (ÆCHom I, 10 (G) [260.65])

þe big sume weige sæt þær se hælend forð ferde REL by some way sat there the Saviour forth went

‘who was sitting by the way where the Saviour passed by’ (7) Old English (WHom 20.2 [9])

feower geara fæce ær he forð ferde four years’ time before he forth went

‘four years before he died’

On the whole, the semantic developments in the Germanic languages are rather similar and follow the same paths; consequently, the inventories of particles in the various Germanic languages show a considerable, non-accidental etymological and semantic overlap.

Moreover, there is a kind of competition between particle verbs and pre-fixed verbs (i.e. verbs with ‘inseparable prefixes’), which in all the Germanic languages represent an older type. At closer inspection, though, this older type turns out to be the likely result of even older verb-particle combinations with the particles in preverbal position, i.e. typical instances of Indo-European preverbs in a position predictable from the basic verb-order in Germanic. Considering the high probability of OV as the basic word order in Proto-Germanic this is, again, not particularly surprising. In some of the Germanic languages there is a strong tendency for this older type to recede, most notably in the Scandinavian languages, while this ten-dency is considerably weaker in the Continental West Germanic languages. In English, a further complication lies in the abundant influx of borrowed verbs from French and Latin in the centuries following the Norman Con-quest. Quite a few of these are partly synonymous with particle verbs, while the new verbal prefixes borrowed into the language via these loan-words have traditionally been taken to seal the demise of many of the older inherited prefixes. This has been a remarkably confused discussion for a

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long time. But nevertheless it is worth being spelt out in some detail, since it is closely connected to the question of the lexical status of the English verb-particle construction from Old English to present-day English, in par-ticular with regard to its stylistic classification. In this context etymological considerations come into play and one must seek an answer to the question why the majority of English verb-particle constructions contain mono-syllabic verbs of Germanic descent, while there seem to be restrictions on the use of borrowed and/or polysyllabic verbs.

At this point a brief note on the use of period labels in this study may be appropriate. The periodisation of languages into ‘old’, ‘middle’ and ‘new’ periods, or even more subtle distinctions, is a tricky issue (cf. Lass 2000). For English the older threefold division has now been largely replaced by a fourfold division into Old English, Middle English, Early Modern English, Late Modern English. Usage as to the extent of these periods may differ considerably. This is particularly true with respect to the distinction between Early Modern English and Late Modern English (the most recently introduced term), which has been drawn in the literature variously between the end of the 17th and the beginning of the 19th century. Likewise, there is no consensus when ‘present-day English’ begins and whether or not it is part of Late Modern English (cf. e.g. Görlach 1994: 8 and Beal 2004: xi– xiv). But the traditional distinction between Old and Middle English is also problematic, despite the seemingly straightforward extra-linguistic water-shed marked by the Norman Conquest (cf. Lutz 2002a). In the present study the periodization is as follows: ‘Old English’ (all English texts before 1100), ‘Middle English’ (up to 1500, subdivided into early Middle English up to 1340 and late Middle English after 1340, cf. Horobin & Smith 2002), ‘Early Modern English’ (up to 1700), ‘Late Modern English’ (up to 1945, following Beal 2004, and thus excluding present-day English). Where finer distinctions are not necessary, ‘medieval English’ will be used as a cover term for Old and Middle English, while ‘Modern English’ is used as a broad cover term for post-medieval English (as opposed to either medieval English or to other Germanic languages). This distinction seems useful in particular with respect to the history of the phrasal verbs, where most research is concerned with either the medieval or the modern period, but rarely with both and where, moreover, the research issues in the former dif-fer markedly from those in the latter.

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1.4. Structure of this study

The study is organized as follows. Chapter 2 is devoted to a discussion of particle verbs in present-day English and in other Germanic languages and serves as a point of reference for the ensuing historical and cross-linguistic explorations. First the basic semantic and syntactic characteristics of phrasal verbs in present-day English are outlined and criteria for distin-guishing phrasal verbs from other verbal structures are established. Also, a number of traditional characterizations of the phrasal verb will be called into question. In a contrastive survey of the other contemporary Germanic languages it is then investigated to what extent the English phrasal verb is structurally remarkable from a synchronic perspective, and what systematic parallels there are across the modern Germanic languages. In the remainder of the chapter arguments are put forward in favour of analysing phrasal verbs as periphrastic word formations in a constructional framework.

Chapter 3 is concerned with the history of the Modern English post-posed particles. A cross-linguistic and comparative discussion of preverbs reveals that the Old English prefix verbs typically represent a more ad-vanced stage in the development of complex predicates, where formerly independent preverbal particles have fused with verbal stems, while the Old English ‘separable prefix verbs’ represent a younger and less advanced stage of what is essentially the same path of development. The remainder of the chapter contains to a discussion of changes in English word order and their connection to the decline of particles in preverbal position.

Chapter 4 critically examines the ways in which the history of the phrasal verbs has been portrayed in the English research tradition of the 20th century, where many traditional beliefs about the construction have hardly ever been put to the test. I will also examine the connections of this to the treatment of particle verbs in the historical dictionaries, which can be shown to provide insufficient and often misleading coverage.

In Chapter 5 the interplay of phonological, morphological and semantic reasons for the loss of native prefixes in medieval English is explored and once again comparative evidence from other Germanic languages is taken into consideration. For a satisfactory and coherent account of the history of the phrasal verbs, it will be necessary to analyse their development in rela-tion to the fate of the native prefixes and in relarela-tion to the transfer and integration of borrowed lexical material in the centuries after the Norman Conquest. Building on the discussion of preverbation in Chapter 3, it is shown that prefix verbs and particle verbs tend to develop along func-tionally equivalent lines. In this context the vexed question is discussed to what extent the older prefixes were replaced by particles and borrowed

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pre-fixes respectively, and how the characteristic etymological and semantic properties of the Modern English phrasal verbs can be explained.

In Chapter 6, the historical reasons for the common perception of phrasal verbs as particularly ‘English’, ‘colloquial’ and ‘informal’ are explored. The first part of the chapter offers a critical survey of quantitative approaches to the development of phrasal verbs in the Modern English period. In the remainder of the chapter it is demonstrated that up to the end of the 18th century attitudes towards the phrasal verb are neutral, and this observation is confirmed by a discussion of a number of 17th- and 18th-century texts. Consequently, I will argue that the common perception of the construction type is rooted in the English normative tradition in a more complex way than has hitherto been assumed.

Chapter 7 provides a summary of results and of open issues, and an outlook to future research.

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Chapter 2

Present-day English and other Germanic languages

The present chapter provides a descriptive reference point for the historical analysis of phrasal verbs. The focus will be on their central semantic, syn-tactic and stylistic properties in present-day English and on their overall role in the lexicon, and it will be argued that phrasal verbs are best treated as periphrastic word formations, particularly if cross-linguistic evidence is taken into account, as a brief contrastive examination of similar, and indeed cognate, constructions in other present-day Germanic languages will show.

2.1. Phrasal verbs: some examples

Phrasal verbs are made up of two components: a verb and a particle which is typically homonymous with an adverb or a preposition (for significant modifications of this preliminary characterisation, see Section 2.6 below). In present-day English, phrasal verbs show a number of distinctive seman-tic, syntactic and prosodic characteristics. Some of these characteristics can be seen in the following examples (all from the BNC):

(1) He nearly gave up, not knowing what to do next.BM0_104

(2) I gave up the job there and then and headed for Brazil.APC_2470

(3) I can see why you gave the job up!HYU_264

(4) I thought that I was being stupid, so I gave it up.B0U_368

(5) Eventually he gave it up, stood up and put on his hat.B0U_368

(6) Beneficial insects such as ladybirds, horseflies and lacewings are encouraged, not killed off, so that they eat up harmful aphids.BN4_1763

(7) If we eat out my favourite meal is oysters and caviar followed by asparagus with melted butter.CEK_4661

(8) This other bloke came in and joined ‘im.CKE_1916

(9) The hours burned by on the green screen, and when they finally flopped in Lucy’s living room, sipping brandy, a key turned in the lock and in came the charmingly dishevelled one and only son.A0L_1418

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(10) If he’d been going to hang up on me, something made him change his mind and could be it was something I said.FAP_3057

Examples (1)–(4) contain the phrasal verb give up in different syntactic configurations. It may be used intransitively as in (1), or transitively as in (2)–(5). In the transitive constructions, the object may follow the particle as in (2) or precede it as in (3); pronominal objects, however, usually precede the particle as in (4) and (5). Semantically, give up is clearly idiomatic, since its meaning cannot be inferred from the individual lexical meanings of its components give and up. However, as the other examples show, the degree of idiomaticity may vary – compare give up in (5) with stand up and

put on in the same sentence and with kill off and eat up in (6) and eat out in

(7). In example (8) at last, come in is entirely compositional from the mean-ing of the simple verb come and the directional particle in. Directional particles like in in (8) can also occur in sentence-initial position, as the inversion construction in (9) shows. Finally, verb and particle may be followed by a preposition and form more complex constructions, the ‘phrasal-prepositional verbs’, as in (10). Phrasal word formation is a productive process in English. But while the number of verbal elements in the construction is unrestricted, the number of particles is rather small, and all of them are homonymous with prepositions or with spatial adverbs. A list for present-day English would at least include the following particles:

aback, aboard, about, above, across, after, ahead, along, apart, around, ashore, aside, astray, asunder, away, back, behind, by, down, forth, for-ward(s), home, in, off, on, out, over, past, round, through, to, under, up (cf.

e.g. the lists in Cowie & Mackin 1975, McArthur & Atkins 1992 or Quirk et al. 1985: § 16.2).

But not every phrasal verb will show all of these typical characteristics exemplified so far, and not all of the characteristics are observable in the above examples, as a more systematic look at the English phrasal verb will show.

2.2. Semantic characteristics

Verb-particle combinations may be highly polysemous; quite commonly, the meanings range on a cline from purely compositional to highly idio-matic:

(11) We’d better take in the children’s toys.

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(13) I’ve taken in your trousers, because they were too loose. (14) Grammar takes in syntax and morphology but not phonology. (15) I thought we might take in a show after dinner.

(16) I was too tired to take in what she was saying.

(17) I’m not surprised he was taken in: he’s as gullible as a child.

These examples from Huddleston & Pullum (2002: 284) are arranged according to their relative compositionality. Such clines are commonly the result of linguistic change, with older and more recent forms continuing to co-exist. A direct comparison of take in ‘carry inside’ in (11) and take in ‘deceive’ in (17) shows the well-known development from concrete to abstract meaning; cf. the further discussion of lexicalization processes below. Not all phrasal verbs show the full range of idiomaticity as take in in these examples – some will be purely compositional in all uses while others will appear as non-compositional combinations only. These can be assumed to have undergone a lexical development from compositional to non-compositional, with the earlier, compositional meanings lost, while the later non-compositional meanings fossilize (a more detailed treatment of this topic will be provided in the historical discussion in Chapters 3 and 5 below).

In another widespread type of phrasal verbs, the particle may function as an aspectualizer, e.g.:

(18) Newcomen got round this difficulty by fitting a leather skirt on top of the piston, this being kept supple by filling it up with water.EED_299

(BNC)

(19) While Charles listened to all this good advice, he drank up his glass of champagne and felt a bit better. ACE_2531 (BNC)

(20) Abraham talked on, not noticing her lack of attention.GW8_176 (BNC)

(21) She chatted away, her hands illustrating her words.CDX_1644 (BNC)

At first sight the different semantic types exemplified here may seem rather random and disordered, but they can be divided into three major semantic categories.

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2.2.1. Three semantic types

Although it is not always possible to draw clear-cut distinctions, it seems useful to distinguish between three, albeit somewhat idealised, semantic types of phrasal verbs, which have been characterized as ‘literal’, ‘aspec-tual’ and ‘non-compositional’ (or ‘idiomatic’); cf. the tripartite semantic division in König (1973: Ch. 9.4), who takes up comparable earlier classi-fications by Bolinger (1971), Fraser (1965 and 1966), Live (1965) and Makkai (1972) but adds the caveat that it is often difficult to distinguish between adverbial, aspectualizing and idiomatic uses (König 1973: 98). However, this threefold categorization is better subdivided as shown in Figure 2-1, since both the combinations with a directional and the combi-nations with an aspectualizing particle are semantically compositional and contrast with the non-compositional combinations whose meanings cannot be inferred from their parts.

In keeping with much of the literature, the compositional type with directional particles will here be simply referred to as ‘compositional’, while the compositional type with aspectual particle will be referred to as ‘aspectual’. With the non-compositional combinations, it is by definition not possible to assign particular meanings to the particles. In the following sections, each of these types will be dealt with in some more detail and thereby (if only implicitly) treated as if they were separate categories. At closer inspection, though, it turns out that both the compositional vs. non-compositional and the directional vs. aspectual particles are more properly to be seen along clines reflecting both their synchronic meaning and their diachronic development (for a comprehensive discussion of particle semantics in present-day English, see Cappelle 2005: Ch. 8; cf. also Dirven 2001).

verb-particle combination

compositional non-compositional

directional particle aspectual particle

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Another well-known semantic classification, proposed by Bolinger (1971), will not be used here (for a discussion of Bolinger’s model, see Hampe 2002). In his discussion of ‘stereotyping’, Bolinger makes a two-fold distinction: (i) between ‘first-level metaphor’, where the literal (‘adverbial’) meaning of the particle is changed, and ‘second-level meta-phor’, where the meaning of the whole phrasal verb is non-literal, and (ii) between ‘first-level stereotype’, where the meaning of the combination is additive, and ‘second-level stereotype’, where the meaning of the combina-tion cannot be inferred from the meaning of its parts (Bolinger 1971: 113– 114). Bolinger’s model, which has not met with widespread acceptance, has a number of inherent problems. These include his choice of terms (e.g. it is usually metonymy rather than metaphor that plays a role in the semantic changes in question, cf. the discussion in Chapter 5 below) but also his choice of categories (which e.g. explicitly include figurative use, a process not specific to phrasal verbs, but not the aspectual combinations).

2.2.2. Compositional constructions

In the compositional constructions, the verb combines with a directional particle and the whole construction is transparent from the meaning of its constituents, e.g.:

(22) Well it reminds me when I was in a shop on the High Street for many years and a little boy and girl came in with a, with an Alsatian dog, a puppy.KM3_748 (BNC)

(23) Fold forward and remove the four bolts which go into the floor and carry the seat out.AN2_1732 (BNC)

The formation of such compositional constructions is a process whose productivity can be illustrated by the exchangeability of verbs and particles (cf. the similar examples discussed in Jackendoff 2002: 74):

(24) George tossed took put carried threw the food up. in. away. back. out.

In such syntagms, the paradigmatic insertion of any verb and any particle seems possible, as long as the combination of verb and particle allows an

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interpretation of motion through space, with the particle expressing the di-rection and the verb expressing the kind of the verbal action.

Characteristically, the directional particles in the compositional con-structions can be replaced by directional prepositional phrases:

(25) George carried the food into the house.

The directional particles can be fronted, cf. the inverted order in (26) with the particle in sentence-initial position. Again, directional prepositional phrases can also occur in this position, cf. (27).

(26) Then the door opened, and in came Felix, Sophie, and Agatha.H8G_451

(BNC)

(27) Into the shop came a young and very hot couple, leaving their bi-cycles outside.H9Y_83 (BNC)

Particles preceding the object can never be replaced in such a way, though. Thus George carried in the food is possible but *George carried into the

house the food is impossible.

It deserves to be pointed out that only the compositional combinations show the full range of syntactic properties typical of phrasal verbs, and that the restriction of the syntactic possibilities clearly goes along with different semantic properties. This is why an exclusion of the compositional combi-nations from the phrasal verbs seems problematic. Quirk et al. (1985: § 16.2 et passim), who would seem to advocate such an approach, do not provide any kind of explanation why the syntactic properties they list are also (and only) possible with other kinds of combinations of verb and par-ticle. In fact, by excluding the compositional combinations from the phrasal verbs by definition (since phrasal verbs are ‘multi-word verbs’ and these in turn are defined as ‘idiomatic’), Quirk et al. (1985) somehow fail to provide an account of their syntactic properties at all, which they do not discuss elsewhere either. Cf. the rather self-contradictory discussion by one of the co-authors of the grammar:

Multi-word verbs are combinations of verbs with other words that form an idiomatic unit, inasmuch as the meaning of the combination cannot be predicted from the meaning of the parts … In free combinations [treated as a sub-category of phrasal verbs, which in their turn are treated as a sub-category of multi-word verbs, ST], the verbs and the particles are both transparent in meaning. (Greenbaum 2000: § 11.18)

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The problem here is connected to the dubious category ‘multi-word verb’ (cf. Section 2.4.5 below).

2.2.3. Aspectual constructions

As is well known, the enormous literature on aspect and aktionsart is cha-racterised by considerable terminological confusion (cf. e.g. Brinton 1988: Ch. 1 and Bußmann 2008: s.vv., and the references there; see also Comrie 1976, the contributions in Vetters & Vandeweghe 1991 and Binnick 2001). Kortmann (1991) suggests drawing the distinction along the following lines:

ASPECT: grammatical category; non-deictic; concerned with situation-internal time; presentation of some situation as incomplete/in progress/existent (‘from within’) or complete (‘from without’) at a given point/period in time; AKTIONSART: lexical category; non-deictic; concerned with situation-internal time; temporal constitution inherent in the meaning of the verb (whether sim-plex, comsim-plex, or verbal syntagm) or predicate. (Kortmann 1991: 19)

Here these definitions are adopted, while the term aspectualizer is used as a cover term for both aspect and aktionsart marking, not least since the observation that the difference between aspect and aktionsart is one of grammatical vs. lexical coding along a (synchronic and diachronic) cline appears to be very much in favour of Sasse’s proposal to altogether abandon the term aktionsart. This would also seem to fit in with the con-structional approach taken here (cf. Section 2.6.4 below):

Aspectuality is always a matter of the correlation of lexical semantics and TAM [viz. tense–aspect–mood] categories, and can be ordered along a continuum from zero lexical and maximal grammatical distinctions to maximal lexical and zero grammatical distinctions. (Sasse 1991: 44)

Consequently the use of aktionsart should be seen as a mere shorthand for ‘lexical aspect’ (for a comprehensive discussion of the aspectual impact of the particles, see Cappelle 2005: Ch. 8).

Aspectual constructions might be treated as a sub-group of the compo-sitional constructions, since their meaning is usually fully transparent and readily understandable ad hoc formations are possible, e.g.:

(28) And having another baby to use the clothes up seems a little extra-vagant.K4P_1490 (BNC)

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But the particles in these constructions are not directional but aspectual and they typically mark telic aktionsart, as shown by Brinton (1985), cf. e.g. (29) and (30):

(29) He used our supplies. (30) He used our supplies up.

Clearly, the difference between (29) and (30) with the added particle up is that in the second sentence the verbal event of the first sentence is pre-sented as directed towards a final stage that is not expressed by the simple verb (although completion may in principle be part of the meaning of a simple verb, e.g. He finished our supplies), i.e. the particle introduces “the concept of a goal or an endpoint to durative situations which otherwise have no necessary terminus” (Brinton 1985: 160). Thus completely in (31) only serves to intensify the particle in a largely synonymous sentence (cf. Peters 1993 on intensification):

(31) He used our supplies completely up.

An apparently redundant use of aspectualizing particles is possible, as in (32) or (33), where the aktionsart meaning of the particle is already present in the simple verb:

(32) Chico finished up his drink.HTU_3724 (BNC)

(33) … so they didn’t come, and I didn't go out and Gemma came up and I was sitting there talking and they had a drop, drop of wine and I had one with erm and Gemma finished her biscuits up …KC2_1222

(BNC)

This is not normally encountered with the directional particles, i.e. pleo-nastic constructions (as in *He entered the room in) are less common, although not impossible:

(34) The hugely distended stomach had to be decompressed before it could be returned back into the abdomen, and the defect in the left hemidiaphragm (6×5 cm) was repaired with 2-;0 silk sutures.FT2_1308

(BNC)

Conversely, fronting of the particle is not possible with the aspectualizing particles (e.g. *Up he ate).

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Quite clearly it is up that is the most central aspectualizer among the particles, both in terms of frequency and of meaning. Besides up, a rather restricted set of other particles can be used as aspectualizer, e.g. down as in the following example:

(35) Spitting it on to the floor, he raised the half-empty bottle to his lips and drank down the fiery vodka in great gulps, as if to drown the useless curses which rose in his throat.CDA_602 (BNC)

(36) She swallowed down a mouthful of wine.JY9_1827 (BNC)

As these examples with down indicate, the distinction between composi-tional and aspectual may be somewhat blurry, since the particle in (35) and (36) is both directional and aspectual. In fact, this overlap provides the con-text for the development of aspectualizing particles out of spatial ones; cf. the discussion in Chapter 5 below.

The particles out, over and through are also found as telic aspectual-izers, e.g.:

(37) With that beat I needed a really stomping guitar line to go with it so I worked it through in my head and then worked out the chords on the piano.C9L_2186 (BNC)

(38) Bill Murray spent £50,000 on setting up his restaurant at Telegraph Hill, near Exeter, Devon, two years ago but said the business started to go downhill when he handed it over to a manager to run.A0C_167

(BNC)

Not all aspectualizing particles are telic, though. The two particles on and along, for example, may function as continuative (i.e. atelic) aspectual-izers, e.g.:

(39) Abraham talked on, not noticing her lack of attention.GW8_176 (BNC)

(40) In the end, Mungo reasoned that the old man had probably been driving along, had somehow caught a glimpse of him, and had taken a short cut from the road.ACV_152 (BNC)

Away is near-synonymous to on, too, but in addition it tends to intensify the

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(41) Breeze talked away for all she was worth as she cut bread-and-butter in the draughty old kitchen, but she knew that her sister wasn’t really listening.BMU_665 (BNC)

To sum up, in the aspectual combinations the particles are used in a semantically transparent way, which may overlap considerably with the ‘literal’, i.e. directional, use of the particles. Another specific characteristic of the aspectual combinations is the occurrence of ‘pleonastic’ combina-tions, where the aspectual value of the particle is also part of the aktionsart of the verb alone.

2.2.4. Idiomatic constructions

Brinton & Traugott (2005: 32) point out that the term lexicalization has been used variously in the literature. In its broadest sense, the term may refer to synchronic word formation processes, more narrowly to fusion with decreasing compositionality but also to processes of separation with in-creasing autonomy. Here the term will be used in a more narrow sense, but broadly enough to encompass institutionalized uses of phrasal verbs which are not idiomatic, and I will refer only to those lexicalized combinations as idiomatic whose meaning is non-transparent (on idiomatization and lexi-calization cf. e.g. Brinton & Traugott 2005 or Bußmann 2008: s.vv. and the references there, and see the discussion of idiomaticity in Chapter 6 below). Thus the idiomatic constructions are different from the two preceding groups in that their meaning cannot be inferred from the meaning of their elements; they belong, quite unambiguously, to the lexicon, as a few exam-ples suffice to show:

(42) My husband actually said to me that giving up smoking was easy because he’s done it plenty of times.JJP_385 (BNC)

(43) In the following extract we see that an equally offensive act is one in which a soft teacher tries to assert authority, but when challenged gives in.ECN_742 (BNC)

(44) Farmers, sailors, and chemists get by perfectly well on the basis of everyday experience, without recourse to Aristotelian logic.ABM_469

(BNC)

(45) He could not make it out, nor could he trust his own memory.BNF_1301

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(46) After she hangs up on Mark, Martha takes a deep breath and dials a London number.HGU_3802 (BNC)

For the idiomaticity of a construction there is some syntactic evidence. With the idiomatic constructions, the positional variants typically tend to be more restricted, cf. (45) above and the following example:

(47) *… and out he made it.

This last property is shared with the aspectual combinations, although the reason for this is more evident in the case of the present category: since no clearly identifiable meaning can be ascribed to the particle, it is unlikely to be focalised in an inversion.

Similarly, coordination of either of the elements in idiomatic phrasal verbs usually results in zeugma, as in (48) and (49), while it is common with compositional combinations, as in (50):

(48) ??He could not make it out or up. (49) ??He could not make and carry it out.

(50) Oh well I think I’ll just play with the tab and make it pop in and out a few times.H61_413 (BNC)

Idiomatic phrasal verbs are certainly the type that has attracted most atten-tion, in particular in the more popular literature (e.g. in style guides, etc.) and in the teaching of English as a foreign language (cf. the discussion of this in Section 2.5 and in Chapter 6). But clear-cut boundaries between the three semantic classes are virtually impossible to draw, since very often literal, aspectual and idiomatic combinations are highly contiguous. More-over, it is worth pointing out that even though non-compositionality may be the prototypical semantic characteristic of the phrasal verbs, it is only in the compositional (transitive) phrasal verbs where the full range of syntactic properties is displayed.

2.3. Syntactic characteristics

The basic syntactic characteristics of the phrasal verbs are well-known and have been amply described in the literature. The syntactic description in this section draws on the criteria long established for the analysis of phrasal verbs in the classic modern studies on the subject, starting with van Dongen (1919) to Wood (1956), T.F. Mitchell (1958), Live (1965), Fraser (1965,

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1966, 1970, 1974, 1976), Bolinger (1971), Sroka (1972) and Pelli (1976); for a critical overview of the pre-1970s classifications, see Lipka (1972: Ch. 1 and the relevant section in his bibliography) and Carstensen (1964), who provides a useful concise examination of the earlier literature and dis-cusses the criteria for phrasal verbs established there. More recent approaches operating with small clauses and intransitive prepositions, which challenge the notion of phrasal verbs in English, will be discussed towards the end of the present section.

2.3.1. Transitivity and serialization

Phrasal verbs may be intransitive, as in the following examples (cf. Jackendoff 2002: 69–73):

(51) Your children will grow up. (52) The whole house blew up. (53) My mother freaked out.

The intransitive phrasal verbs given as examples in these sentences clearly belong to the class by virtue of their idiomatic meaning. But intransitive constructions of the kind He went away will also be regarded as phrasal verbs in this study, although viewing these intransitive non-idiomatic cases in isolation one could argue in favour of an analysis as verbs with adverbial complements rather than phrasal verbs, where the particle away would be analysed analogous to to the National Gallery in He went to the National

Gallery; cf. König’s (1973: § 9.1.2) examination of the fuzzy distinction

between verb particle and directional adverb. Studies of the phrasal verb are often remarkably reluctant to discuss this issue, which is frequently decided on by fiat. But although an exclusion of this type can make sense from a syntactic point of view, a study with a focus on the phrasal verb (and in particular one concerned with the history of the construction) should, to my mind, include this type, also because it provides the dia-chronic input to the development of aspectual and idiomatic meanings.

With transitive phrasal verbs, if the object is a full noun phrase the ob-ject may come either before the particle, as in examples (54)–(56), or after the particle,1 as in examples (57)–(59) (i.e. ‘joined’ vs. ‘split’ order in terms

1 Note that this and similar statements are used here only as convenient descriptions of the order of the elements, which are handier to use than, e.g.,

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of Lohse, Hawkins & Wasow 2004; other current designations include ‘continuous’ vs. ‘discontinuous’ order, but also less readily intelligible dis-tinctions like ‘construction0’ vs. ‘construction1’ used by Gries 2003).

(54) I can put out the announcement.G0P_253 (BNC)

(55) They never blew up the houses.ANU_761 (BNC)

(56) He had left out Peter.

(57) I can put the announcement out. (58) They never blew the houses up. (59) He had left Peter out.

However, if the object is a pronoun, it will normally precede the particle: (60) I put it out.

(61) They blew them up.

(62) … he had left him out …H9D_3243 (BNC)

(63) *I put out it. (64) *They blew up it. (65) *He had left out him.

It seems that the position of the object is connected to a number of factors, including its weight. Thus Quirk et al. (1985: 1154) state that the “particle tends to precede the object if the object is long, or if the intention is that the object should receive end-focus”; cf. the following examples (based on Jackendoff 2002):

(66) Lila looked up the answer to the question that was on everyone’s mind.

“the order may be V O prt or V prt O”. They are not meant, however, as a commitment to what constitutes the ‘normal’ or the ‘underlying’ order, let alone an implicit commitment as to whether it is the particle or the object that ‘moves’; i.e. in the present context the statement that the particle may precede the object and the statement that the object may follow the particle are interchangeable.

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(67) *Lila looked the answer to the question that was on everyone’s mind up.

(68) Lila looked it up. (69) *Lila looked up it.2 (70) He left out hím (not hér).

The position of the objects in the example (5) above and in similar instances can thus be accounted for in principle; a more precise description of the factors governing the choice between the two positional variants is, however, considerably more intricate in detail and no analysis has so far gained general acceptance. Generative approaches in particular have been very much concerned with accounting for the serialization alternatives typi-cal of the transitive construction and there the issue, being a major touchstone for theory-internal skirmishes, seems far from resolved (cf. e.g. Dehé 2002 or Farrell 2005). Among the detailed studies devoted to the subject of particle placement in present-day English, Dehé (2002) argues that the ‘neutral’ order is ‘verb-particle-object’ and that the choice of one order rather than the other depends on the “news value” (Dehé 2002: 77) of the object, while Gries (2003) describes particle placement as a construc-tional alternation which depends on a number of variables and which can be explained by a statistical multifactorial analysis of these variables. Gries in particular provides an exhaustive list of the criteria suggested so far in the literature; but cf. also Cappelle (2009), who argues in favour of a free variation in an ‘allostructional’ analysis (see Section 2.6 below). Moreover, prepositional complements may not intervene between the verb and the particle, thus:

(71) Sim ran away to the city. (72) Please look out for Harry.

(73) Jill grew up into a strong woman. (74) *Sim ran to the city away. (75) *Please look for Harry out.

(76) *Jill grew into a strong woman up.

2 This is a possible construct, but not in the intended sense; cf. Section 2.3.2 below.

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This remains true in nominalisations (cf. Section 2.4 below): phrasal verbs can be nominalised, but in nominalisations, a prepositional complement always follows the particle, thus: The rapid looking up of the information

is important or The prompt sending out of the reports is commendable, but

not *The rapid looking of the information up is important and *The prompt sending of the reports out is important; “although of-NP is the counterpart of the direct objects in such nominals, it behaves as a PP with respect to particle position, just the way it looks” (Jackendoff 2002: 72).

An adverbial modifier like right or completely can precede the particle. However, this is only possible if the particle follows the object (see Jackendoff 2002: 70–73 for more examples and for a more detailed discus-sion), e.g.:

(77) I’ll look the answer right up. (78) Please shut the gas completely off. (79) *I’ll look right up the answer. (80) *Please shut completely off the gas.

Other syntactic characteristics are noticeably tied to the semantic make-up of the verb-particle combination and involve fronting of the particle and growing rigidity of word-order. Thus the particle may immediately precede the verb, as in (81); cf. also (9) above.

(81) A tap is turned, a pressure of 120 pounds per square inch applied to the piston, and up goes the end of the coach as easily as though it were a doll’s house.B2S_161 (BNC)

In such sentences with a fronted particle, the subject follows the verb if it is a full noun phrase. This is one of the noticeable exceptions from subject-verb order in declarative sentences in present-day English. If the subject is a pronoun, though, it will immediately precede the verb:

(82) (and …) up it goes.

But fronting of the particle is of course only possible in compositional combinations with a directional particle.

Just as the placing of ‘heavy’ noun phrases is evocative of the Law of Growing Members, the occurrence of other positional variants could be characterized as predictable from Behaghel’s First Law, since in these cases growing semantic compositionality goes along with syntactic adjacency

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(Behaghel 1909, 1930 and 1932: § 1426). Quite clearly in many cases the syntactic properties depend on the semantics of the phrasal verb. Cappelle (2009) argues that apparently the degree of lexicalization plays a role in the choice between joined and split order, with a tendency for ad hoc for-mations to appear in split order, while idiomatic combinations show a clear tendency to appear in joined order. But this tendency is mainly a correlation between idiomatic combinations and joined order, while there is no compa-rably strong correlation between compositional combinations and split order (cf. Lohse, Hawkins & Wasow 2004: 256).

On the whole, the positional variability of verb and particle decreases with the degree of idiomatization, both absolutely, as in the case of particle fronting, and relatively, as with respect to the alternative between joined and split order. Some phrasal verbs only allow one sequence of elements, especially in those cases where the phrasal verb and the object form an idiomatic phrase. Thus in give up hope the particle normally precedes hope as in (83), while the acceptability of (84) is highly doubtful; conversely, in

laugh one’s head off the particle will be placed in final position as in (85),

while the order in (86) is again highly doubtful:

(83) By the time I had almost given up hope, a telegram arrived.G3B_1882

(BNC)

(84) ??By the time I had almost given hope up, a telegram arrived. (85) By this time Irene was emitting a steady gurgle of contentment, when

she wasn’t laughing her head off.FYV_985 (BNC)

(86) ??By this time Irene was emitting a steady gurgle of contentment, when she wasn’t laughing off her head.

This is confirmed by a search of the BNC, where sequences as in (84) and (86) are not attested (cf. e.g. Quirk et al. 1985: § 16.4n. for more examples). Other idiomatic phrases contain passive phrasal verbs and occur in the passive only, e.g. fed up with something:

(87) I’m convinced half of them don’t actually open, they’re just designed as offensive weapons for use by psychopaths fed up with not getting a seat on the tube.HWL_938 (BNC)

There is nothing particularly remarkable about this: syntactic restrictions are a well-known property of idioms (cf. e.g. Burger 2007: 16–32), which can be observed here in idioms containing phrasal verbs.

(41)

2.3.2. Particles and prepositions

A distinction between phrasal, prepositional and phrasal-prepositional verbs was first suggested by T.F. Mitchell (1958) and has since found its way into many reference accounts of English; for a fuller description see e.g. Quirk et al. (1985: Ch. 16), Biber et al. (1999: Ch. 5) and Huddleston & Pullum (2002: Ch. 4; but note that the classification there diverges considerably from other reference grammars). The discussion in Quirk et al. (1985: § 16) is somewhat diffuse and fails to provide a coherent syntactic analysis, but it is quite valuable as a repository of examples (cf. the critical evaluation by Mahler 2002, with further references, and the arguments put forward against prepositional verbs by Klotz 2000: 53–60).

Here prepositional verbs will not be treated as a sub-category of phrasal verbs. This conflation is sometimes encountered in English linguistics and lexicography, where one can find a distinction between ‘phrasal verbs with prepositions’ (i.e. prepositional verbs) and ‘phrasal verbs with adverbs’ (i.e. phrasal verbs). Nevertheless a comparison of the phrasal verbs with the prepositional verbs serves to illustrate their specific syntactic properties. At first sight the underlined strings in the following sentences may seem to be quite similar:

(88) The following day the then Indian Prime Minister, Rajiv Gandhi, called on the King and they exchanged views on bilateral mat-ters.HKS_3008 (BNC)

(89) The silence returned, and he switched on the light.CKB_368 (BNC)

However, a closer look reveals that the two examples contain constructions which differ considerably. In (88), on is a preposition and may be analysed as part of a prepositional verb call on (but see the caveat below). In (89), on is a particle that belongs to a phrasal verb switch on.

The differences are highlighted by a number of well-known contrasts exemplified in Table 2-1. The prepositional verb may be analysed either as

She looked at the book or as She looked at the book – some of the

permuta-tions in the table above could be taken to support the first analysis, others to support the second. However, in either case (and in the first case it might be advisable to abandon the term ‘prepositional verb’ altogether), at would be analysed as a preposition. But the particle of the phrasal verb is clearly distinct from a preposition, despite similarities as in a. and b.; the positional characteristics illustrated in c. to f. have already been discussed above.

References

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