John,

 

I’ve used Lester’s book a number of times in a course here for future English teachers. Overall, I’d say there’s one major problem with it, but otherwise it’s extremely good. The problem is that he doesn’t make a clear form/function distinction. I’m not sure why he doesn’t – it could be that he’s trying to stick to the K-12 school grammar tradition, which is understandable, but the lack of that distinction is one of the things that constantly causes problems for anyone trying to teach the material (“You said only nouns could be plural, but in ‘accounts receivable,’ the adjective is”).

 

The book is so good in other respects that I’ve continued to use it, using handouts to deal with the form/function distinction. But, of course, then the students get annoyed because I’m disagreeing with the textbook, and I get annoyed with them because the last thing future teachers should do is view a textbook (or their instructor’s comments!) as Holy Writ.

 

Sincerely,

 

Bill Spruiell

 

 

• 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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