My apologies for some carelessness with the last post. I meant my 
example to read like the following.

I   often    think           about blank.

I often   think about             blank.

It seems to me that once it becomes lexicalized, however the means, the 
resultant structure can evolve new meanings, just like all words do, 
which can then seem to have little resemblance to the original source. 
So concepts like "catch on" or "carried away"or "stand for" are no 
longer predictable from their initial elements. That would seem to 
contradict Ron's view that these particles have to be adverbial. To the 
dictionary makers, I think the choice on whether to list them probably 
hinges on that sense of unpredictability. They have to define "make up" 
as possibly meaning many different things that  can't be predicted by 
"make" plus "up." "I made up the story." "I made up with my wife." "I 
made up a shopping list." and so on.
   The concept of phrasal verbs is probably easiest to spot with these 
structures that have unpredictable meanings. To "put down a friend" is 
not the same as to "put down a tool."  The first seems like a separate 
two part word in its own right.

Craig




Craig Hancock wrote:
> Herb, Peter, Bill, Ron,
>
> With apologies if this seems too theoretical for most people’s tastes. 
> I have been thinking about these things for several months now and 
> have mostly held back while the thoughts come into focus.
>
> The problem I currently have with trying to find a classification for 
> “think about” is that I am starting to believe we make these 
> categories more important (more governing) than they actually are. We 
> tend to feel as if words have to act certain ways because of the 
> grammar, rather than believing that the grammar itself arises out of 
> our use of words. (Or that it is a dynamic relationship, a 
> lexico-grammar, word-grammar, cline.) When classification becomes an 
> end in itself, the living, dynamic language gets left behind.
>
> Another way to think about it is that the process of thinking is often 
> conceived of (and articulated) as “about” something, and over time 
> “think” and “about” come together often enough to start feeling like a 
> single phrase rather than a verb plus prepositional phrase with a 
> variable object.
>
>
> I often think about blank.
>
> I often think about blank
>
> From this way of thinking, the verb will begin to pull the preposition 
> into its orbit, helped by two forces—one is repetition (the words 
> coming together so often)--and the other is congruency with our 
> experience of the world, our conception of what thinking is like. In 
> other words, we continue to use it because it is practical to use it, 
> highly “functional.” And this becomes patterned.
>
> From a rule based approach, we have to say that “all grammars leak”, 
> but that may be because they try to treat the language as frozen and 
> not dynamic. If we see the creation of phrasal verbs as a dynamic 
> process, then it is easy to treat in-between examples as part of that 
> process of change—of grammatical structures being lexicalized and 
> lexical terms being pulled into the grammar. From a usage based 
> perspective, leaking is likely. Just like words, the grammar is always 
> coming into being.
>
> This gives us an approach to grammar that pulls us into meaning and 
> one that frames meaning itself as contextual and dynamic.
>
> Craig
>
>
>
> STAHLKE, HERBERT F wrote:
>> Ron,
>>
>> Let's start with easiest of your questions, how to use information like
>> this in teaching.  The fact is that I wouldn't present a seven-fold
>> classification of anything grammatical in an ESL context.  I might be
>> forced to do something like that if I were teaching Chinese nominal
>> classifiers, of which there are dozens, or Bantu noun classes, which can
>> exceed a couple dozen, but fortunately English doesn't do such things.
>> What's important in developing both fluency and register control in
>> non-native speakers is that they learn to shift particles when doing so
>> is pragmatically motivated, that they learn to use a passive when that
>> structure is pragmatically motivated.  And this they will learn much
>> better from usage and practice than from grammar drill.
>>
>> I think perhaps you confused Bill and me in the latter part of your
>> post.  Actually, the classification I posted is from Sidney Greenbaum's
>> Oxford English Grammar (OUP, 1996), so I can't take credit for it.
>> Transitivity does have degrees.  Intransitives take only a subject,
>> (mono)transitives take a subject and a direct object, and ditransitives
>> (SG's "doubly transitives") take a direct object and an indirect object,
>> which may or may not require a preposition.  Indirect object, bear in
>> mind, is a function, not a structure, and it can show up as either a
>> bare NP or as the object of a preposition.  I suspect SG uses
>> "monotransitivity" in a excess of clarity, the result of which isn't
>> necessarily what the writer hopes for.
>>
>> Actually, SG doesn't distinguish between "look at" and "look after".  In
>> his discussion of prepositional verbs (p. 282), he uses "look at" as an
>> example of a monotransitive prepositional verb. 
>> Back to the question of goals for a moment.  SG was writing a reference
>> grammar, and so his goal was to provide as complete and thorough a
>> classification of English structures as he could.  Hence his seven
>> classes of phrasal/prepositional verbs.  What the ESL teacher does with
>> this classification is subject to different, pedagogical goals, and I
>> hope that teacher would keep SG's treatment well away from his students,
>> while being informed by it as he or she prepares lesson plans.
>>
>> Herb
>>
>> One of the great advantages of this List (and particularly if one has
>> the
>> intellectual courage to state what one knows about grammar with the
>> attendant possibility of being proven to be wrong and the even worse
>> possibility of realising that one has been teaching something to
>> students
>> which is possibly incorrect) is the potential it has to make one
>> re-examine
>> one's own assumptions about some point of grammar.
>>
>> Herb's comments on the complexities of phrasal verbs and Bill's list of
>> three examples are cases in point.  This query, then, is just to clarify
>> things in their posts and particularly in the context of ESL.
>>
>> Bill's list of three is as follows:
>>
>> I looked [up the chimney] prepositional phrase
>> I [looked up] the word phrasal verb
>> I looked [up] adverbial particle.
>>
>> Just to avoid ambiguity, I would modify the second two as follows:
>>
>> I [looked up] the word.    As 'up' is an adverbial particle and as 'the
>> word' is the direct object of the resultant phrasal verb, 'look up' is a
>>
>> transitive phrasal
>> verb.
>>
>> I looked [up].  As 'up' is an adverbial particle and as there is no
>> direct
>> object, 'look up' is an intransitive phrasal verb.
>>
>> Would Bill agree with this modification?
>>
>> Herb's list of seven really puts the cat amonst the pigeons of my 
>> assumptions about transitivity.  Here's Bill's list:
>>
>> 1.  intransitive phrasal verbs, e.g. "give in" (surrender)
>> 2.  transitive phrasal verbs, e.g. "find" something "out" (discover)
>> 3.  monotransitive prepositional verbs, e.g. "look after" (take care of)
>> 4.  doubly transitive prepositional verbs, e.g. "blame" something "on"
>> someone
>> 5.  copular prepositional verbs, e.g. "serve as"
>> 6.  monotransitive phrasal-prepositional verbs, e.g. "look up to"
>> (respect)
>> 7.  doubly transitive phrasal-prepositional verbs, e.g. "put" something
>> "down to" (attribute to)
>>
>> My problem is with 3  This is the first time that I have encountered the
>> term 'monotransitive' so perhaps Bill can explain the significance of
>> the addition of 'mono-'.
>>
>> In the case of 3, why is Bill implicitly differentiating 'look at' and
>> 'look after'?   I ask this because I am assuming that he is not 
>> claiming that 'look at' is a monotransitive prepositional verb.  In 
>> the case of ESL, I
>> think it preferable to consider them both intransitive in order not to
>> muddy the transitive waters too much.
>>
>> 6 & 7 are also problematic in ESL terms for the same reason but perhaps
>> we can come to those later.
>>
>> Ron Sheen
>>
>> To join or leave this LISTSERV list, please visit the list's web
>> interface at:
>>      http://listserv.muohio.edu/archives/ateg.html
>> and select "Join or leave the list"
>>
>> Visit ATEG's web site at http://ateg.org/
>>
>> To join or leave this LISTSERV list, please visit the list's web 
>> interface at:
>>      http://listserv.muohio.edu/archives/ateg.html
>> and select "Join or leave the list"
>>
>> Visit ATEG's web site at http://ateg.org/
>>
>>
>>   
>
> To join or leave this LISTSERV list, please visit the list's web 
> interface at:
>     http://listserv.muohio.edu/archives/ateg.html
> and select "Join or leave the list"
>
> Visit ATEG's web site at http://ateg.org/
>
>

To join or leave this LISTSERV list, please visit the list's web interface at:
     http://listserv.muohio.edu/archives/ateg.html
and select "Join or leave the list"

Visit ATEG's web site at http://ateg.org/