Phrasal Verbs
eBook - PDF

Phrasal Verbs

The English Verb-Particle Construction and its History

  1. 316 pages
  2. English
  3. PDF
  4. Available on iOS & Android
eBook - PDF

Phrasal Verbs

The English Verb-Particle Construction and its History

About this book

The book traces the evolution of the English verb-particle construction ('phrasal verb') from Indo-European and Germanic up to the present. A contrastive survey of the basic semantic and syntactic characteristics of verb-particle constructions in the present-day Germanic languages shows that the English construction is structurally unremarkable and its analysis as a periphrastic word-formation is proposed.

From a cross-linguistic and comparative perspective the Old English prefix verbs are identified as preverbs and the shift towards postposition of the particles is connected to the development of more general patterns of word order. The interplay of phonological, morphological, syntactic and semantic factors in the loss of the native prefixes in the history of English is investigated. In this context the question is discussed to what extent the older prefixes were replaced by particles and borrowed prefixes, how the characteristic etymological and semantic properties of the Modern English phrasal verbs can be explained and what role they play in the lexicon. The author argues that their common perception as particularly 'English', 'colloquial' and 'informal' has its origin in the eighteenth-century normative tradition.

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Yes, you can access Phrasal Verbs by Stefan Thim in PDF and/or ePUB format, as well as other popular books in Languages & Linguistics & Languages. We have over one million books available in our catalogue for you to explore.

Information

Table of contents

  1. Acknowledgments
  2. List of figures
  3. List of tables
  4. Abbreviations
  5. 1. Introduction
  6. 2. Present-day English and other Germanic languages
  7. 3. The development of postposed particles
  8. 4. Writing the history of the phrasal verb
  9. 5. Word formation, sound change and semantics
  10. 6. Frequency, style and attitudes
  11. 7. Conclusion
  12. References
  13. Index