Greetings, ATEGers!

Someone (I believe it was Herb) recently suggested a book to me: Mark
Lester's (1990) *Grammar in the Classroom*. I'm not sure why I haven't
discovered this book before, but I quite like it and would suggest it to
anyone reviewing grammar texts. Even if you can't use it in your classroom,
you and/or your  students might enjoy knowing about it as a reference text.
I find Lester's writing to be straightforward and uncluttered. Has anyone
actually used this as a classroom text for teachers-in-training? If so, I'd
be interested to hear about your experiences.

I went to the text specifically to find some more information on phrasal
verbs, information that wasn't overly technical for non-linguistic students
but also not overly simplified so as to ignore descriptive facts. I thought
I'd share here a few of the main points about phrasal verbs that Lester
includes.


   - Lester suggests that phrasal verbs are part of Latin and Germanic
   languages' process of creating new words by adding prepositions (functional
   words) to verb stems. Latin languages tended to add the preposition to the
   beginning of the verb stem with Germanic languages adding them to the end.
   (example, "devour" from "de-" (down) and "voro" (swollow) in Latin)
   - When English forms a new word by adding a preposition to the beginning
   of a verb stem (example, "bypass" "offset"), it is more quickly and easily
   recognized as a new word; people forget that it used to be a phrasal
   verb/verb +preposition combination because, orthographically, it is written
   without a space. However, English tends to leave the space when the
   preposition is added to the end of the verb stem. (example, "give up")
   - While a sentence like "I give up" may look like a pronoun, a tensed
   verb, and an adverbial preposition, it is in fact a pronoun and a phrasal
   verb (note: I always learned to call the preposition that has become
   attached to a verb in such a way a "particle," but Lester continues to call
   it a preposition, which doesn't bother me at all). Lester points out a fun
   test for phrasal verbs -- can you replace the unit with a single word
   (almost always of Latin origin) and retain the meaning? In this case, "I
   give up" becomes "I surrender." (Lester points out the irony in the fact
   that "surrender" was once itself a phrasal verb in Latin!)
   - Phrasal verbs can be transitive; this can mark the difference between a
   phrasal verb and a verb+preposition combo even more. For example,

          John turned out the light. (Noun subject+phrasal verb+noun phrase
object)
          John turned at the light. (Noun subject+verb+adverbial
prepositional phrase)

          Say the sentences out loud and notice the stress. In phrasal verbs
the preposition is stressed while it is not in the PP.

   - Phrasal verbs can have more than one preposition/particle: look down
   on, talk back to, walk out on, etc.
   - Lester points out that phrasal verbs were dumped from traditional
   school grammars because the word "preposition" in Latin literally means "to
   place before," and it was reasoned that prepositions couldn't be connected
   to  verbs if they came after them. Sometimes phrasal verbs were treated as
   idioms.
   - Structural linguists have noted the difference between separable and
   inseparable phrasal verbs.Separable phrasal verbs have prepositions that can
   be moved to a position after the object noun phrase (example, "I gave up the
   game" vs "I gave the game up" or "I gave it up"). Inseparable phrasal verbs
   have prepositions that cannot be moved (example, "I depend on the income" vs
   *"I depend the income on" or *"I depend it on").
   - As you can see from the above examples, when the object of a separable
   transitive phrasal verb is a pronoun, the movement of the preposition is
   obligatory. You would always say "I gave it up" and never *"I gave up it."
   (I think I would cringe if I heard this avoided with some clunky
   construction like, "Up it is that I gave it.") In this sense, it is actually
   *ungrammatical* to NOT end a sentence with a preposition.

Hope all the grammar nerds enjoy this as much as I did!

Regards,

John Alexander
Austin, Texas

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