John,
I’m glad you found Lester’s book useful. I’ve used it as a
reference often, but, with some regret, I’ve never used it as a text, maybe
because by the time that edition came out I’d stopped using textbooks in my
grammar classes and started using The Oxford English Grammar with lots of
handouts.
I will add just one comment to your excellent summary. I
learned the object pronoun wrinkle a long time ago as you have described it in
your last bullet. It was sometime later that I realized that that word order
is an artifact of discourse pragmatics. If the DO is a pronoun, it’s generally
old information and therefore unstressed and reduced. The result is that it
can’t carry the tonic accent of the sentence, and so the particle, which you
note is generally stressed is placed finally to bear that accent. It’s a nice
instance of discourse function influencing sentence-level syntax.
Herb
From: Assembly for the
Teaching of English Grammar [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of John
Dews-Alexander
Sent: 2009-03-23 20:00
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Phrasal Verb Overview
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!
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