Richard, thanks for pointing this out. I lifted it straight from Lester's text without giving it enough thought.
 
I agree with you that it does seem easy to think of "depend on coffee" as a separable phrasal verb when you put it that way, but I think it must be in the gray area, perhaps transitioning from one category to another because I find the evidence to point to it as an inseparable phrasal verb unless I'm approaching this incorrectly.
 
I think that what your example is pointing out (which is likely your main point) is that there are even more granular subsets of phrasal verbs within the larger categories of "separable" and "inseparable." Your example seems to support that "depend on" is a phrasal verb because even in your transformation of the sentence "coffee" remains the object of the verb and not a modifier. However, while Lester calls it "inseparable," your construction shows that it can be separated.
 
a. I depend on coffee.
b. *I depend coffee on. (Lester's text seems to use this as evidence that the phrasal verb is inseparable.)
c. Coffee is a drug I depend on. (a version of your construction that keeps the phrasal verb intact)
d. Coffee is a drug on which I depend. (your construction that separates the phrasal verb)
e. I depend on it.
f. *I depend it on. (since no obligatory movement, evidence for phrasal verb as inseparable)
 
The same pattern is seen with a phrasal verb like "vote on":
 
a. The committee voted on the motion.
b. *The committee voted the motion on.
c. The motion is an initiative the committee voted on.
d. The motion is an initiative on which the committee voted.
e. The committee voted on it.
f. *The committee voted it on.
 
Both of these phrasal verbs are described by non-native dictionaries that I have as inseparable phrasal verbs (I suspect so that learners of English won't make ungrammatical statements such as "b" and "f" in both examples above.)
 
Then there's the example you give of "give up," which you call inseparable but that I find to be truly separable:
 
a. I gave up coffee
b. I gave coffee up.
c. Coffee is a drug I gave up.
d. (?)(*)Coffee is a drug up which I gave.
e. *I gave up it.
f. I gave it up. (pronoun movement is obligatory which supports separable phrasal verb).
 
So, we have an interesting pattern. Phrasal verbs that are typically considered inseparable can separate in a specific construction. Is this just because of prescriptive rules against ending a sentence with a "preposition" that forced us to into another structure?
 
Or perhaps there's more to it since a traditionally separable phrasal verb cannot be easily separated in the same structure. Isn't this odd and the opposite of what we'd expect? Maybe there's another discourse constraint happening here that I can't quite see.
 
My guess right now is that there are sub-classes of phrasal verbs that may be able to account for this pattern; in any case, the sub-class distinctions are likely ones I'd avoid in my classroom at everything but the most advanced levels.
 
John

On Tue, Mar 24, 2009 at 9:58 AM, Veit, Richard <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
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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