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FEATURE |
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What do 'phrasal verbs' mean to you? Here's what one teacher wrote:
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. 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:
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. 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 take in fill in/fill out get on/get into 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). 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 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. The definitions and examples of phrasal verbs are taken from Macmillan Phrasal Verbs Plus, published by Macmillan Publishers Limited, 2005. Text © Bloomsbury Publishing Plc, 2005. You can read more about the connection between concrete and metaphorical meanings of phrasal verbs, and how they fit into general 'conceptual metaphors' in English vocabulary, in Rosamund Moon's 'Metaphor and Phrasal Verbs'. You can read much more about the particles which are used to form phrasal verbs in Seth Lindstromberg's book English Prepositions Explained (John Benjamins 1997). This includes one chapter on 'Prepositions and Directional Adverbs in Phrasal Verbs', but the whole book is a goldmine of relevant information. The sense of the word 'motivation' used above is described in greater detail in George Lakoff's Women, Fire and Dangerous Things (University of Chicago Press 1987). One comment that I often hear from learners and teachers is 'We don't have anything like phrasal verbs in our language.' I'm sure this is true for many languages, but in the next article I want to show that most European languages, at least, do have verbs which are formed in similar, if not identical, ways, and whose meanings are in many cases similarly transparent. A window is etymologically a 'wind-eye': an opening
to let air and light in (compare Norwegian vindu and Danish vindue).
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ec
also mean literally 'nose-horn', and exactly the same applies to Dutch
neushoorn, Swedish noshörning, Russian 
and Hungarian orrszarvú.