Phrasal Verbs decoded, the position of the object/accusative

[metal56]

I suspect you are misinforming your students, as you appear to be sadly misinformed yourself as to what constitutes a phrasal verb and the particles that are elemental in their formation.

But do not despair, all will be revealed in the near future.

Kind regards

kvinchuca

Please tell me something. Which of these are phrasal verbs, in your opinion?

turn down
believe in
get up
look forward to
have faith in
look after
get on with
talk about
put up with
break down
run out of
wait for
get off

[metal56]

"In linguistics, the term particle is often employed as a useful catch-all lacking a strict definition. In general, it is understood that particles are function words that tend to be uninflected — that is, words which do not have suffixes, for example, that reflect grammatical gender, tense or person. However, the term may have a broader definition.

Depending on its context, the meaning of the term may overlap with such notions as "morpheme", "marker", or even "adverb" (another catch-all term)."

More at:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grammatical_particle

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grammatica ... _particles

[JuanTwoThree]

To save you from making a total idiot of yourself, kev, before you reply I strongly suggest you google scholar "Dwight Bolinger" and "Celse-Murcia" with or without the search term "phrasal verb".

Here particle is just a convenient short-hand for the adverbial and the prepositional second or third parts of multi-part verbs. It is not easy out of context to establish the nature of the particle:

"I ran him over": the particle is adverbial.

"I ran over him" : it's prepositional,

so it's convenient to use the word "particle". But a particle is not a part of speech in the way that a "noun" is:

http://www.oup.com/elt/catalogue/teache ... s/glossary

[JuanTwoThree]

metal56, you can understand the confusion when half the world, even your wiki article, suggests that the "off" of "put it off" is prepositional.

kev, resist the temptation to call me misinformed or say that I teach badly, and I'll lay off the cheap shots from now on, ok? Because, believe me, I do know what I'm talking about.

[metal56]

metal56, you can understand the confusion when half the world, even your wiki article, suggests that the "off" of "put it off" is prepositional.

It's a mystery to me.

[lolwhites]

Kev's tried to impress us before with dazzing explanations of phrasal verbs:

http://www.eslcafe.com/forums/teacher/v ... ght=#22160

I don't recall feeling especially enlightened then either. In fact, this "just wait till my article comes out" is rather reminiscent of Londo Molari's "buy my book when it comes out for my foolproof language teaching method". Not that that came to much either.

[Stephen Jones]

Yes, I remember this nonsense about court jesters and pig's bladders. I suppose it is comforting to know that there are only a couple of obsessives around instead of a plague of them.

At least our Argentinian colleagues can write English, unlike the mad Chinaman who blasted all traditional descriptions of English verb tenses because it didn't fit in with his version of Chinglish.

Personally I think I'll give a miss on the magic book that shows us how to reduce 4,000 lexemes to 41. I'll wait for the version that comes in a pill, so all I need to do is swallow it. After all it must be a lot easier to swallow a pill than a horse!

[kvinchuca]

To

Metal 56, quote, ”need help?”.
No , I needed some sleep.

To

Juan Two Three, quote,
“The "on" of "you're having me on, Kevin" is not an adverb?
Gosh, I had no idea. Silly me. Still, I expect I'm not the only one feeling a bit silly:

Yes Juan Two Three, you should feel silly. The on is a particle. To have somebody on has only one particle. If however the phrasal verb has at first glance an accompanying adverb or preposition, the adverb/preposition look-alikes are in fact particles too. The whole phrase then demonstrates how one particle interacts with the other.
I started this thread to show where and why the object placement is significant in phrasal verbs, and stated the particles have an importance, lesser importance, or no importance at all.
I did this without giving an explanation or justification as to why this is so. That explanation along with the 41 particles will be published hopefully by the beginning of June.
When the work is published I and my colleague will be happy to hear and discuss any criticism and if necessary, rebuff all and any that can be shown to be false.
Any new discovery, or revolutionary invention usually has its critics, the intelligent assessor keeps his counsel until he has evaluated all the facts, lest he makes a fool of himself.
Since I have reserved the justification and clarification until the time of publication, nobody is in a position to agree, or disagree, with the validity of our findings but are left to muse over the possibilities.
A sceptical approach is a healthy approach, but I note a more confrontational attitude, possible due to youthful inexperience in the posts of Metal56 and Juan Two Three.
You may both find something worth thinking about in the following:
“In the clashes between ignorance and intelligence, ignorance is generally the aggressor.
Paul Harris”

And now after missing my sleep for 38 hours I’m going to bed. Night, night,
Kind regards
Kvinchuca

[metal56]

A sceptical approach is a healthy approach, but I note a more confrontational attitude, possible due to youthful inexperience in the posts of Metal56 and Juan Two Three.

Hey, Kev with all the experience you claim to have, you still haven't answered the simple question I twice put to you:

Please tell me something. Which of these are phrasal verbs, in your opinion?

turn down
believe in
get up
look forward to
have faith in
look after
get on with
talk about
put up with
break down
run out of
wait for
get off

[metal56]

Hey folks, we have a troll in our midst. I suggest we ignore that troll.

Troll: kv*nch*ca

[JuanTwoThree]

Since you seem to like dictionary definitions let's try a few:

1 A quote from a paper:

http://lingo.stanford.edu/pubs/WP-2002-01.ps.gz

"According to the definition in Collins Cobuild Dictionary of Phrasal Verbs, the expression phrasal verb refers to the combinations of verbs with adverbial or prepositional particles"

2 From the Oxford University Press

www.oup.com/elt/catalogue/teachersites/ ... s/glossary

"particle: an adverb or preposition that can combine with a verb to make a phrasal verb"

3 Try the definition in paragraph 1.2 of this:

www.cog.brown.edu:16080/Research/nlp/pa ... lloc01.pdf

(That's Collins, Stanford/Cambridge, Oxford and Brown. What next?)

4 Chambers defines a phrasal verb as a verb phrase combined with an adverb or preposition or both. Here's the online version:

www.chambersharrap.co.uk/chambers/chref ... title=21st

5 This:

A phrasal verb in Present-Day English is a verb that takes a complementary particle, in other words, an adverb resembling a preposition, necessary to complete a sentence. A common example is the verb “to fix up”: “He fixed up the car.” The word “up” here is a particle, not a preposition, because “up” can move: “He fixed the car up.” This movement of the particle “up” quickly distinguishes it from the preposition “up”. Because the forms of the particle and the preposition are themselves identical, it is easy to confuse phrasal verbs with a very similar-looking type of verb: the prepositional verb"

from:

www.chass.utoronto.ca/~cpercy/courses/6361lamont.html

6 "According to the Longman Student Grammar of Spoken and Written English (Biber, Conrad, & Leech, 2002), phrasal verbs consist of a verb followed by an adverbial particle, such as the verb “find out.”

from:

http://oak.cats.ohiou.edu/~kw382698/Phrasal%20Verbs.htm

Can you see that there are particles which are exclusively adverbial (eg back, out. away) and there are particles that are exclusively prepositional (eg to, of, into). The rest of the particles are one or the other depending on context (see my "run over" example) An easy test is to look at the 3 part verbs, the first particle is usually one of the exclusively adverbial particles and it "needs" one of the prepositionals to be complete:

* I look forward your visit.

The argument often is whether to include "verb and preposition combinations" in the term "phrasal verb".

My opinion is that for teaching purposes we should include the more figurative verbs plus prep. but that, linguistically, phrasal verbs should only be considered as verbs plus adverbial particles, when there are two parts (though of course as verbs followed by adverbial followed by prepositional particles in the case of the 3 parters).

It's when these particles are adverbial that they are splittable:

"I'm putting you through": adverbial

"Let's run through this again": prepositional (and strictly not a PV in linguistics)

So my answers to metal56's list are these:

turn down: "turn down the offer" down is adverbial and a pv, turn down the road is prep and not even a pv.

believe in (prep and not a pv)

get up: get them up/get up that ladder (see turn down)

look forward to: (forward adverbial, to prepositional)

have faith in: red herring

look after (verb and preposition, PV for teaching but not linguistic purposes)

get on with (see look forward to)

talk about (not a PV except perhaps for teaching purposes)

put up with (see look forward to)

break down ( pv, verb plus adverbial particle)

run out of (see "look forward to")

wait for : might be taught as a PV but isn't strictly

get off: similar to turn down, depending on the position of the pronoun object.


If I can find the syntactic rules for true phrasal verbs I will post them for you.

[metal56]

Since you seem to like dictionary definitions let's try a few:

Is that post for Kev?

[metal56]

Juan, how can I get to read ".gz" files?

http://lingo.stanford.edu/pubs/WP-2002-01.ps.gz

[JuanTwoThree]

Yes it is. Though why I bother?

Idon't know. From Google Scholar I have to press "view as html"

[metal56]

Yes it is. Though why I bother?

Don't. It's not worth it.

Idon't know. From Google Scholar I have to press "view as html"

OK. Thanks.