One of the tests for a transitive phrasal verb is whether it can be made passive.  

Seattle depends heavily on coffee for its economic survival.
Coffee is heavily depended on by Seattle for its economic survival.

Of course, this is not the only test, and the fact that there are a number of different types of phrasal verb indicates that, as with other categories, phrasal verb is also a fuzzy category, just as verbs themselves are, ranging from invariant modals like "must" to full agentive transitive verbs like "hit."

Herb

-----Original Message-----
From: Assembly for the Teaching of English Grammar [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Veit, Richard
Sent: 2009-03-24 10:58
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: Phrasal Verb Overview

John,

In your penultimate bullet below, "depend on" does feel like an "inseparable phrasal verb," but there is one bit of evidence that "on" is a true preposition:

 *
I depend on coffee.
 *
Coffee is a drug on which I depend.

Compare that with a true phrasal verb:

 *   I gave up coffee.
 *   *Coffee is a drug up which I gave.

A similar example of a seeming but debatable phrasal verb is "call on" as in "Willy calls on a dozen accounts each day." There are real "inseparable phrasal verbs" such as "come by" ("McDuck came by his wealth honestly"), but I wonder whether "depend on" and "call on" are among them.



I have another question for ATEGers. A phrasal verb typically consists of a verb-word and a preposition-word. But what about those two-word predicates such as "look forward" and "put forth" where the second word is neither a preposition-word nor separable from the verb-word? Do we call them "phrasal verbs" as well?



Dick Veit



________________________________
From: Assembly for the Teaching of English Grammar [[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of John Dews-Alexander [[log in to unmask]]
Sent: Monday, March 23, 2009 7:59 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Phrasal Verb Overview

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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