John, 

I think another point about phrasal verbs in their separable and inseparable forms has to do with the reason the preposition is called a particle.  There are a few adverbs, like “back”, that do not have a prepositional use, but are found in separable phrasal verbs.  Also, many of the prepositions seem to have a very distinctive meaning when used as part of a phrasal verb.  To “give up” is certainly a different meaning (aspectual) than to “walk up the street” (locative).  The reason they are called particles, I think, is to help us keep this distinction in mind. 

Bruce

 

 

 

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

 

 

• 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,

• 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.

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