MED Magazine

MED Magazine - Issue 32 - July 2005

Phrasaled out? Don't worry! Help is at hand
by Jonathan Marks

The thing that hits you later

What do 'phrasal verbs' mean to you? Here's what one teacher wrote:

'In a recent multinational conversation I had we decided we could divide all languages into those that are easy to learn at the beginning and then hit you when you least expect it, like Spanish with the subjunctive, and those that hit you straight away, like German with its cases. English was universally put in the first group, and the thing that hits you later was also universally agreed upon: phrasal verbs.'
(Alex Case: Review of Really Learn 100 Phrasal Verbs in Modern English Teacher 12/2 2003)

Not a very sophisticated bit of comparative linguistics, of course, but it certainly highlights a perception commonly held by learners, and often fostered by teachers: the perception that phrasal verbs are one of the major sources of bewilderment and frustration in the process of learning English.

Five misunderstandings

In this short series of articles, I'll be taking a look at some widespread misunderstandings about phrasal verbs and, I hope, showing how they can be approached in ways that makes them less bewildering and more learnable. The misunderstandings are:

• Phrasal verbs are illogical, or random, or unpredictable

• Phrasal verbs are unique to English

• Phrasal verbs are necessarily informal or colloquial

• Phrasal verbs necessarily have 'proper', non-phrasal equivalents

• Phrasal verbs are a rarified area of English lexis, separate from the rest

Randomness, unpredictability and difficulty

Learners face apparent randomness and unpredictability in vocabulary all the time. If you're a beginner, for example, there's no particular reason why the word window should mean what it does, but at least it's easily learnable because it occurs so frequently and has a clear (see-through!) meaning. And it's easy to see how it has taken on other meanings – both concrete, such as a work area on a computer screen, and metaphorical, such as a window on the world. (Actually, nowadays some people learn the computer meaning first, before they even start learning English.)

At a more advanced level, you might face the task of learning the word rhinoceros. Here again, there might seem to be no reason why it means what it does. And you probably won't meet it very often, though that depends on where you are, of course, which might mean you need to make more effort to learn it. You might find the spelling or pronunciation a bit tricky. But otherwise it's actually a rather straightforward word; once you know which animal it refers to, there's really nothing more to learn about it. And perhaps the very oddity of the word helps you to remember it, and to associate it with the oddity of the creature. (In fact, there are good etymological reasons why window and rhinoceros mean what they mean; if you don't know, look at the end of this article.)

But what about 'Rebels have set up an independent state within the country', or 'They sat taking in the glorious sunset'? You know set, up, take and in; but why do they mean what they mean in these and numerous other similar combinations? There appears to be nothing to distinguish one phrasal verb from another; they're mostly made up of the commonest, blandest, least characterful words in English, in seemingly endless random combinations and with very little clue about which combinations have which meanings. And sometimes they seem positively perverse and illogical. If in and out are opposites, how is it possible that 'fill in a form' can mean the same thing as 'fill out a form'? Why do you 'get on a train' but 'get into a car'? And so on. It turns out that, contrary to expectations, words like on and take are more difficult than words like rhinoceros.

Lexical logic

It's easy to take for granted that certain compounds and phrases are inevitable logical combinations of words – bedroom, for example. But why not sleeproom, or sleeping room? Either of these would be equally logical, and indeed other languages use them: Schlafzimmer (German), slaapkamer (Dutch), sovrum (Swedish) and hálószoba (Hungarian) all mean 'sleep(ing) room'. Dormitorio (Spanish) and sypialnia (Polish) also mean a place for sleeping. In fact, the combination of bed + room is neither random nor inevitable, but rather 'motivated': it couldn't have been predicted with certainty that English would choose this combination, but it's easy to see why it did. Lexical logic is selective.

If you take a closer look at phrasal verbs, you can see that in many cases the choice and combination of verbs and particles is also 'motivated' in this sense. To return to the examples given above:

set up
Set is often used with adverbs and prepositions when it means 'to put someone or something in a particular position'. So you might set up a physical object such as a refreshment stand so that it's ready for use – 'up' because it will involve things like moving items of food and drink upwards onto a table, constructing a makeshift roof over the table to keep rain off, and so on. If you set up an independent state, or a business, or an organisation, you do something metaphorically similar: you put together all the necessary components so that it's ready to function.

take in
If you take in, or 'spend time looking at', something like a sunset, you absorb visual information through your eyes.

fill in/fill out
When you fill in a form you put information into the empty spaces; the paradoxical alternative fill out is motivated by one of the common uses of out to mean 'finish something, do something completely' (compare clean out, dry out). So filling in and filling out a form amount to the same thing, in practice.

get on/get into
You get on a train but get into a car because in the case of the train you generally have to step upwards as well as inwards.

The motivation behind some combinations is less obvious. For instance, the origin of peter in the phrasal verb peter out (e.g. 'The conversation soon petered out') is obscure, but at least it's easy to understand the use of out in the meaning 'stop existing, end, disappear' (compare die out, fade out).

Logic and creativity

New phrasal verbs are coined all the time, in a process which might, again, appear to be random, but which is actually regulated by the same meaning relationships as those in established phrasal verbs. Here are three examples.

1 In 'Understanding phrasal verbs: is there a system?', Michael Rundell shows how one of the basic meanings of back in phrasal verbs, 'returning to a place you were in before', has been extended into the meaning of 'returning to an earlier time', e.g. look back, think back. These two are established, but it's also possible to use other verbs in the same way, and in her song 'Furry sings the blues', Joni Mitchell makes use of this possibility in describing a statue of a musician:

'like he's listening back to the good old bands
and the click of high-heeled shoes'

2 In her article on new phrasal verbs in the Language Study section of Phrasal Verbs Plus, Kerry Maxwell notes that out and up are among the particles most commonly used to coin new phrasal verbs.

One of the common meanings of out is 'having done something so much that you don't want to do it any more', e.g. tire out, wear out. On a teacher-training course held by a lakeside a few years ago, the tutors gathered every evening for beer on a terrace overlooking the lake. After a few days of this routine, I asked one of my colleagues if he was coming down to the terrace and he replied 'Oh, I don't know, I think I'm just about terraced out.'

3 There's a qualification for English language teachers called the Diploma, informally known as the 'Dip'. One common meaning of up is 'improving' or adding value to something. The director of a language school told me 'I think we'll have some teachers to dip up next year.'

We understand such innovations – and can invent them ourselves – in the same way that we understand a large proportion of established phrasal verbs: because they're based on underlying regularities of meaning.

So if you feel 'phrasaled out', remember that studying the typical concrete and metaphorical meanings of verbs and particles will in many cases help you to understand how the meanings of phrasal verbs arose.