Teacher Discussion Forums

Which is the correct term?

prepositional-phrasal verb

phrasal-prepositional verb

Calling it a 'PPV' would enable one to sleep on it awhile.

fluffyhamster wrote:Calling it a 'PPV' would enable one to sleep on it awhile.

That¡s nice. Now you can rush off to class with another easy term.

Metal..have you googled for it and see what you can get?

Maybe the one whichs pops up the most would be the right one????

I'm just wondering....

José

PS: For prepositional phrasal verb I got 42 entries and for phrasal-prepositional verb I got 164..is that a start???

Metamorfose wrote:Metal..have you googled for it and see what you can get?

Maybe the one whichs pops up the most would be the right one????

I'm just wondering....

José

PS: For prepositional phrasal verb I got 42 entries and for phrasal-prepositional verb I got 164..is that a start???

There's/are a lot of idiots and NNES out there. I'm not sure I'd trust Google frequency counts.

I'm not sure I'd trust Google frequency counts

They're a pretty useful tool, (though not for the purpose Metamorfose suggests) and you can check for discrepancies by comparing with frequency counts from other search engines. You do have to be careful that you are not comparing apples and oranges though.

And of course idiots have as much right to have their contributions counted as the intellectually well-endowed.

The number of non-native speakers is small; my experience is less than five percent of the hits returned by Google for high frequency items.

Stephen Jones wrote:
The number of non-native speakers is small; my experience is less than five percent of the hits returned by Google for high frequency items.

How did you calculate that?

Guesstimate, based on the results from the first three or four Google pages when I do a Google Search for linguistic or other reasons.

More problematical are likely to be the spam bot links, where random text generators produce nonsense, simply in order to allow sites to renew regularly in an attempt to fool Google.

There are other problems regarding the way Google counts are done, particularly with regard to wildcards. Liberman regularly publishes lists of the difficulties on Language Log.

Non-native speakers are unlikely to take up a significant proportion of the English pages on the web. Most non-native speakers with sufficient computer skills and money to set up a web-site are likely to be doing it in their own language. The exceptions will be non-native speakers of English who are immigrants in English-speaking countries, and educated professionals in technical or scientific fields from outside, but they will not add up to a great deal, and you would still have the problem with other corpus searches anyway.

Google Searches are useful complements or replacements from the BNC when you want to check up different frequencies in British and
World English, or when you want to check up a particular collocation, and would not have sufficient data in the BNC. It also is useful for checking up on recent coinages.

For example the BNC has two examples of 'between you and I' for 46 of 'between you and me'. On the other hand Google has a proportion of only around 6 to 1 in favour of 'between you and me". (697,000 to 116,000). Now admittedly some of the "between you and I" cases are from grammar sites stating the usage is incorrect, but even factoring those out it does appear that the collocation is more common in American English than in British English, and has been gaining ground strongly in the last few years, both of which agree with my intuition.

A lot depends on what the Google search is trying to explain. To suggest that frequencies on a Google Search can adjudicate the correct technical term between two alternatives, as Metamorfose does is ridiculous. Equally, when there are a small number of returns, -- say under a couple of hundred, it is worth checking through carefully to see that it is not a case of a erroneous entry from a high-profile site being copied unthinkingly by others.

It's a tool, and like all tools it is more suitable for some things than others.

Metal..have you googled for it and see what you can get?

Maybe the one whichs pops up the most would be the right one????

I'm just wondering....

José

PS: For prepositional phrasal verb I got 42 entries and for phrasal-prepositional verb I got 164..is that a start???

To suggest that frequencies on a Google Search can adjudicate the correct technical term between two alternatives, as Metamorfose does is ridiculous.

Just to make things clear, the phrase is that a start? and the "modal"-like questions I made was intended for a reference and departing point than a definite suggestion, to make a straightfoward suggestion like this would be totally irresponsible and ignorant from me. And indeed for this case, as you pointed it, it will not work.

José

So, I slept on it, bought me some time, got me a gun, robbed me a bank, then finally could buy me a copy of the Macmillan Phrasal Verbs Plus dictionary.

The Syntactic Behaviour of Phrasal Verbs by Elizabeth Porter (central Language Study section, page LS2):

Phrasal verbs are made up of a verb and a particle. A particle can be:

-an adverb (such as out or away): for example go out, put away

-a preposition (such as with or from): for example deal with, shrink from. Phrasal verbs with a preposition are sometimes called prepositional verbs.

Some phrasal verbs have two particles, both an adverb and a preposition: for example get on with or stand up for. Verbs with an adverb and a preposition are sometimes called phrasal-prepositional verbs.

The Oxford PVs Dictionary for learners of English mentions that the last two types of the three most common types of PV are 'sometimes called INSEPERABLE verbs as the object always follows the particle' (the three types of PV are: v+adv, v+prep and v+adv+prep).