Phrasal verbs decoded

[kvinchuca]

Phrasal verbs have been one of the most difficult areas of English to both teach and learn, and for the intermediate and advanced student a source of a feeling of inadequacy when they are proficient in grammar and vocabulary. The dedicated student, who has mastered the seemingly endless list of irregular verbs (the list is quite small really) has grappled with and overcome most of the grammatical difficulties, can spell and pronounce the ridiculously troublesome words such as hiccough, has a mountain to climb.
Whereas in Spain and France the English language is not governed by a body such as the Real Academia Española or the Académie Française, and dictionaries differ as to what is a phrasal verb and what is idiomatic speech. If the dictionaries cannot agree and one may describe a phrase as idiomatic and another as a phrasal verb, then the problem for the teacher and student alike is twofold.
Since there are thousands of idiomatic phrases, and thousands of phrasal verbs, how is the student ever going to speak like a native?
When I took my TESOL course many years ago, I and other prospective English teachers were told that the only way to learn phrasal verbs was by heart, the reason being there was no apparent logic behind them. Yet these phrases make up a huge amount of the daily spoken vocabulary of native speakers who acquired them in the same way they acquired their grammar, unaware and completely ignorant of their origins.
When a native English teacher attempts to explain the meaning finds that he or she cannot give a reason why ‘give over’ translates to ‘stop doing’ and the same goes for thousands of other phrases.
Now, learning these phrases by heart can become a thing of the past.
My colleague José García Bes and I have dedicated ourselves to the task of deciphering the seemingly impossible and have discovered a logical framework that can be used to explain English phrasal verbs.
Our quest for the answers led us to the medieval period and has been a sort of linguistic archeology. There are 41 particles (prepositions or adverbs) that combine with verbs to form phrasal verbs. We have identified almost 4000 different definitions which fit within the framework of our hypothesis, and I am sure that the average student would find 4000 different definitions a daunting sum to commit to memory. We have found that one only needs to know the general significance of each particle in order to have a command of the verbs, thus reducing the problem by a hundredfold. Without giving the game away completely, I will give an example of how easy the problem can be overcome.
Each particle represents a social level, activities or events, or locations where these societies and events took place during the medieval period.
The following is our explanation of the phrasal verbs that take the particles around/about. The particles in this case can be used as alternatives such as roll around, or roll about. When the particle about is used with no alternative, then the significance of the particle is different from the meaning of around/about. The particle around, when used with no alternative is also different from the meaning when it is used with around/about.
Around/about suggests situations, actions, attitudes and certain activities that took place around the medieval town centre or market-place, but unrelated to commercial activities such as buying and selling.
The alternatives around/about overwhelmingly suggest the following:
1 idleness, time-wasting, and non-production.
2 people who are common, badly behaved, ill-mannered, clownish, unsophisticated, lacking control and being spectators at a show.
Several verbs give a clue as to the meaning of around/about: fool, horse, lark, play and slap.
Here we have key elements of street theatre dating from medieval times that continue to be widely represented in many parts of rural England and can be seen in the performances of today’s Morris Dancers. Morris Dancing is a traditional pastime in many parts of England performed in the open air as a form of street theatre. The dancers are troupes of men who continue the traditions of folk-dancing and mummer’s plays ( a simplistic type of early theatre depicting the struggle between good and evil, often religious in content but retaining pagan symbolism from the pre-Christian era). For more information go to
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morris_dance
The street theatre in those days was ribald, bawdy and unrefined, with unambiguous use of references to bodily functions as a basis for much of their humour and comedy, which today we call ‘toilet humour’.
The spectators would crowd around/about, sit, lie, roll, hang, wait, gad, and mill around/about. The actors were looked down on by the upper-classes as vagabonds, wastrels, prostitutes and sturdy beggars, and as such subject to imprisonment and hard-labour.
The public was entertained by the antics of the players who often poked fun at people in the audience as well as within their own group of actors, as still happens today at many morris dancing events. Two of the most important protagonists of these ancient plays remain with us in the morris dancing teams, the fool and the hobby-horse.

The fool, armed with an inflated pig’s bladder on a stick would hit victims, selected at random from the audience (knock sb/sth around/about). Slap means to hit with the open hand to cause a painful stinging sensation but little or no damage. The fool would hit people with a slapstick, a device made of wood with a loose, hinged section. When a blow is delivered with the stick it produces a loud crack that gives the spectator the impression that the blow was hard, violent and obviously painful, whereas the exact opposite is true. From this comes the _expression “slapstick comedy”.
The fool would lark around/about (lark being a derivative of laik, meaning to play or not do work, and is still commonly used in many parts of northern England).
The antics of the fool appealed to the coarser nature of the crowd with references to arse, bum, fart, piss, bugger and *beep*. He may even poke, sniff, scratch, touching his victim in a genuine or simulated sexual manner in order to get cheap laughs from the victims friends and other spectators, who then fall or roll about/around laughing.
It is no coincidence that today’s morris dancers delight the crowds by performing in the street, but always outside a pub or country inn. The dancing appears to have only two reasons for being.
One is to dance to entertain and the other is to spend the money collected from the bystanders on alcoholic drink, such as beer or cider and hence the chosen venue being outside the pub. When drinking a toast to the health of the company these days, glasses are raised and gently tapped together. Medieval revellers under the influence of large amounts of alcohol were less refined, clashing their metal tankards together so that beer or wine sloshed (spilled) out of their drinking vessels and onto the table or floor. To slosh money around/about, now means to have money to waste, as in the wasted beer that is spilled.Horse around/about comes from the hobby-horse, a regular protagonist in mummer’s plays and a common feature in many morris teams. For more information go to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hobby-horseThe hobby-horse capering around could quite easily knock over a small child or bump into one of the spectators, thus meaning to behave in a way that is both careless and potentially dangerous.




Phrasal verbs have been one of the most difficult areas of English to both teach and learn, and for the intermediate and advanced student a source of a feeling of inadequacy when they are proficient in grammar and vocabulary. The dedicated student, who has mastered the seemingly endless list of irregular verbs (the list is quite small really) has grappled with and overcome most of the grammatical difficulties, can spell and pronounce the ridiculously troublesome words such as hiccough, has a mountain to climb.
Whereas in Spain and France the English language is not governed by a body such as the Real Academia Española or the Académie Française, and dictionaries differ as to what is a phrasal verb and what is idiomatic speech. If the dictionaries cannot agree and one may describe a phrase as idiomatic and another as a phrasal verb, then the problem for the teacher and student alike is twofold.
Since there are thousands of idiomatic phrases, and thousands of phrasal verbs, how is the student ever going to speak like a native?
When I took my TESOL course many years ago, I and other prospective English teachers were told that the only way to learn phrasal verbs was by heart, the reason being there was no apparent logic behind them. Yet these phrases make up a huge amount of the daily spoken vocabulary of native speakers who acquired them in the same way they acquired their grammar, unaware and completely ignorant of their origins.
When a native English teacher attempts to explain the meaning finds that he or she cannot give a reason why ‘give over’ translates to ‘stop doing’ and the same goes for thousands of other phrases.
Now, learning these phrases by heart can become a thing of the past.
My colleague José García Bes and I have dedicated ourselves to the task of deciphering the seemingly impossible and have discovered a logical framework that can be used to explain English phrasal verbs.
Our quest for the answers led us to the medieval period and has been a sort of linguistic archeology. There are 41 particles (prepositions or adverbs) that combine with verbs to form phrasal verbs. We have identified almost 4000 different definitions which fit within the framework of our hypothesis, and I am sure that the average student would find 4000 different definitions a daunting sum to commit to memory. We have found that one only needs to know the general significance of each particle in order to have a command of the verbs, thus reducing the problem by a hundredfold.
Without giving the game away completely, I will give an example of how easy the problem can be overcome.
Each particle represents a social level, activities or events, or locations where these societies and events took place during the medieval period.
The following is our explanation of the phrasal verbs that take the particles around/about. The particles in this case can be used as alternatives such as roll around, or roll about. When the particle about is used with no alternative, then the significance of the particle is different from the meaning of around/about. The particle around, when used with no alternative is also different from the meaning when it is used with around/about.
Around/about suggests situations, actions, attitudes and certain activities that took place around the medieval town centre or market-place, but unrelated to commercial activities such as buying and selling.
The alternatives around/about overwhelmingly suggest the following:
1 idleness, time-wasting, and non-production.
2 people who are common, badly behaved, ill-mannered, clownish, unsophisticated, lacking control and being spectators at a show.
Several verbs give a clue as to the meaning of around/about: fool, horse, lark, play and slap.
Here we have key elements of street theatre dating from medieval times that continue to be widely represented in many parts of rural England and can be seen in the performances of today’s Morris Dancers. Morris Dancing is a traditional pastime in many parts of England performed in the open air as a form of street theatre. The dancers are troupes of men who continue the traditions of folk-dancing and mummer’s plays ( a simplistic type of early theatre depicting the struggle between good and evil, often religious in content but retaining pagan symbolism from the pre-Christian era). For more information go to
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morris_dance
The street theatre in those days was ribald, bawdy and unrefined, with unambiguous use of references to bodily functions as a basis for much of their humour and comedy, which today we call ‘toilet humour’.
The spectators would crowd around/about, sit, lie, roll, hang, wait, gad, and mill around/about. The actors were looked down on by the upper-classes as vagabonds, wastrels, prostitutes and sturdy beggars, and as such subject to imprisonment and hard-labour.
The public was entertained by the antics of the players who often poked fun at people in the audience as well as within their own group of actors, as still happens today at many morris dancing events. Two of the most important protagonists of these ancient plays remain with us in the morris dancing teams, the fool and the hobby-horse.

The fool, armed with an inflated pig’s bladder on a stick would hit victims, selected at random from the audience (knock sb/sth around/about). Slap means to hit with the open hand to cause a painful stinging sensation but little or no damage. The fool would hit people with a slapstick, a device made of wood with a loose, hinged section. When a blow is delivered with the stick it produces a loud crack that gives the spectator the impression that the blow was hard, violent and obviously painful, whereas the exact opposite is true. From this comes the expression “slapstick comedy”.
The fool would lark around/about (lark being a derivative of laik, meaning to play or not do work, and is still commonly used in many parts of northern England).
The antics of the fool appealed to the coarser nature of the crowd with references to arse, bum, fart, piss, bugger and *beep*. He may even poke, sniff, scratch, touching his victim in a genuine or simulated sexual manner in order to get cheap laughs from the victims friends and other spectators, who then fall or roll about/around laughing.
It is no coincidence that today’s morris dancers delight the crowds by performing in the street, but always outside a pub or country inn. The dancing appears to have only two reasons for being.
One is to dance to entertain and the other is to spend the money collected from the bystanders on alcoholic drink, such as beer or cider and hence the chosen venue being outside the pub. When drinking a toast to the health of the company these days, glasses are raised and gently tapped together.
Medieval revellers under the influence of large amounts of alcohol were less refined, clashing their metal tankards together so that beer or wine sloshed (spilled) out of their drinking vessels and onto the table or floor. To slosh money around/about, now means to have money to waste, as in the wasted beer that is spilled.Horse around/about comes from the hobby-horse, a regular protagonist in mummer’s plays and a common feature in many morris teams. For more information go to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hobby-horse
The hobby-horse capering around could quite easily knock over a small child or bump into one of the spectators, thus meaning to behave in a way that is both careless and potentially dangerous.

The complete list of particles and their explanations will be published next year, so don't give up, hold out until I reveal all.
For more information contact me at
[email protected]

[JuanTwoThree]

41?

In no particular order:

aboard ashore about across around after apart aside away back round again before by down forth for forward forwards backward backwards in into on onto up upon over through to together from of short upward upwards downward downwards abeam abaft aloft along alongside alongsides sideways past home as like adrift asunder again aback with without ahead toward towards throughout outward outwards inward inwards below above between

That's 66 and before breakfast with a hangover so I'm sure there are more. Or less if I've repeated myself.

The middle ages town may be a useful mnemonic for remembering and contextualizing PVs, accepting that this term includes prepositional verbs for the moment, but I hope you're not suggesting that this is the origin of all of them: many are much older than these social customs or units and have parallels in other cognate languages where these customs did not exist at the time of their coining.

However, the logical framework is a neat idea but why can't it be a contemporary town? How many would you lose if it was?

Besides I doubt if you can shoehorn every PV into such a tidy idea. Taking for example your assertion that about/around when interchangeable are "overwhelmingly" connected with idleness. Well it occurs to me is "move" "shake" "wave" etc simply mean a more or less circular and perhaps restricted movement. Nothing idle about them I'm afraid

In my list there is also a strong nautical element so I hope your town has a quayside.

[fluffyhamster]

The approach outlined is quite interesting, but I agree with JTT that it can't hope to cover all PVs, and there are surely better contexts to be had, especially if the meaning of the PV would seem reasonably clear - why get into cultural history so much when there are basic defintions to be had in a good modern learner dictionary?

Talking of dictionaries, ones dedicated to PVs often have sections outlining the general meaning of the prepositions, and lists of the more common and/or useful PVs into which they enter (see the back of the COBUILD, for example).

I'd be more interested in dependable paraphrases (to be taken aback: surprised, possibly shocked, even offended?; to keep/stay abreast of, keep up with: Do you know much about the latest developments in linguistics/methodology/ESL textbooks etc?), or in e.g. the euphemistic value of saying e.g. 'to take sb out' rather than 'kill' or 'murder', rather than possibly too detailed explanations of some perhaps quite marginal items.

[Will.]

Hmmm?

I like the menmonic too, perhaps with an in-class presentation and some of Breughel 's paintings for visuals...possible. nice idea, if only to set a sort of template for learners.

Not bad for a maiden speech.

[kvinchuca]

The number of particles used to make phrasal verbs that we have identified is 41, the others that you mention such as ashore, alongside etc., are not used to make phrasal verbs. Check them out.

[JuanTwoThree]

You may be right . You show me yours and I'll show you mine. I was only thinking aloud. On an empty stomach. With a headache.

Many would disagree with your inclusion of verbs plus preposition in the category of PVs but since you do include them it opens the door to a veeeeeery wide definition of them, as most verb plus preposition combos are very literal.

Maybe you think the use needs to be somehow figurative, idiomatic or metaphorical to be a true PV. Semantically different from its parts in other words.

Are these phrasal verbs:

"Plans to unite the companies have run aground although many investors had come alongside."

Aground, that's 67. Or not. "run aground" is definitely a phrase consisting of a verb and an adverb which can be used in a way that's not strictly literal.

We took an inconclusive look at this in

http://www.eslcafe.com/forums/teacher/v ... php?t=3683


What's a phrasal verb? And what are the 41?

[kvinchuca]

I certainly know what it is like to think in an empty stomach after a night on the booze, and I suspect we are distantly related.
The point is, there is no definitive body such as the Real Academia Española for example, to say what constitutes a phrasal verb.
The Cambridge advanced Learner's Dictionary defines copy<>sth down as phrasal verb, yet the Oxford Advanced Learner's Dictionary and the Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English define it as a normal verb, however the Longman does give copy <>sth out as phrasal verb as does the Cambridge. One dictionary say one thing and others say another, so who is to say which is right.
We have used the existing definitions of these dictionaries, rather than giving our own in order to obviate the criticism that we are trying to force the definition into the mold.
The discovery that we have made will be revealed in the new year, but at the moment we are rather like car manufacturers, keeping the product under wraps. This is purely from a financial point of view and not because we are unable to argue our position.
Thankyou very much for your interest, it realy is appreciated and any criticism helps because if we can logically refute the criticism, then it strengthens our original premise.
The basis of our work has been purely English English and not American English because the evolution of the language is different. So once again thanks for the interest and keep in touch, contact me at
[email protected]

[ssean]

As the above posts suggest the number of phrasal verbs seems endless and there is little or no connection between the combination of words and the acutal meaning. Faced with such a daunting prospect I don't explicitly teach phrasal verbs, I justify this to myself on two ground. Firstly, most if not all of my students aim to achieve a high enough mark in an academic test to go to university. Phrasal verbs have an informal register which more times than not can be replaced with a single verb, secondly the amount of time students would have to spend on diligently learning phrasal verbs I believe could be better directed at learning vocabulary or grammar which is more generative. However, in readings or more often spoken text when phrasal verbs do occur we will look at them in class. I'm more in favour of teaching such vocabulary items incidentally rather than explicitly.

[fluffyhamster]

Have you guys seen the new phrasal verbs dictionary from Macmillan? It has twelve or so "flowcharts" that show the most common meanings associated with e.g. '...through' or '...up', which lead eventually to lists of the most frequent PVs that combine with that particular word('s meaning). That, plus a collection of short papers by various academics and experts detailing important aspects of PVs.