A Study on the Historical Development of the English Phrasal Verb andthe syntactic test

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English phrasal verb originated from Old English, and originally produced in Anglo-Saxon.It evoluted and developed through different historical stages from Old English, Middle English to Early Modern English, and it has now become a very active and rapidly developing part of Contemporary English. A study on the historical development and the syntactic testmethods of phrasal verbs can make us fully distinguish the relations and differences between English phrasal verbs, prepositional verbsand Prepositional phrase verbs. It is easy to grasp the usage of English phrasal verb after understanding the word formation characteristics.

phrasal verbsold Englishmiddle Englishmodern Englishsyntactic test1 Definition of the Phrasal Verb and Similar Concepts

A phrasal verb in Present-Day English is a verb that takes aparticle, in other words, an resembling a , necessary to complete a sentence. A common example is the verb "to fix up”：He fixed up the car.The word “up”here is a particle not a preposition because “up”can move：He fixed the car up.This movement of the particle “up”quickly distinguishes it from the preposition“up”. Because the forms of the particle and the preposition are themselves identical, it is easy to confuse phrasal verbs with a very similar-looking type of verb: the prepositional verb. A prepositional verb takes a complementary prepositional phrase. Movement verbs are readily identifiable examples. For example, the verb "to go" isand without the benefit of context, it cannot operate in a complete sentence only accompanied by a subject. One cannot say, "I went," and expect to satisfy a listener without including a prepositional phrase of place, such as I went to the store. Prepositional verbs are immediately distinguishable from phrasal verbs in terms of movement, as prepositions cannot move after their objects. It is not possible to say, I went the store to,and so "went" is a prepositional verb. In factthere are severalto distinguish phrasal from prepositional verbs, and these will be discussed in detail in the final section. It is also necessary to understand that the term "verb phrase" refers not to phrasal verbsbut more generally to a sentence verb, its complements and matters of tense,, and so on.

2 The Historical Development of the English Phrasal Verb

2.1 The Ancestors of Phrasal Verbs in Old English

Old English generally did not possess phrasal verbs as they are foundin Present-Day English. They did exist although they were rare. Much more common in Old English was the inseparable-prefix verb, a form in which the particle was attached to the beginning of the verb. These Old English prefixed verbs are directly comparable to current phrasal forms. For example, in Present-Day English there is theverb "to burn" and then the phrasal monotransitive "to burn up." Old English had "b rnan" (to burn) and "forb rnan" (to burn up). The prefix "for-" remained affixed to the verb and could not move as modern particles can. Such Old English compound verbs were also highly idiomatic in that the meaning of the compound form did not necessarily reflect the meaning of the root. Denison provides "ber dan" as an example because it meant to dispossess, while its root verb"r dan" meant to advise. The phenomenon still survives today in the participle "forlorn" as well as the verb "understandan", which does not in Present-Day English mean "to stand underneath sth", but idiomatically "to comprehend". Akimoto suggests that Old English prefixes often remained before the verb because Old English had strong object-before-verb tendencies, whereas Present-Day English is largely a VO language which has made it possible for particles to travel to -verbal positions. Some Old English verbs did function as modern phrasal verbs do. Denison points out that Koopman finds and analyses examples of Old English phrasal verbs with post-verbal particles. In the Chronicles of England the speaker says, "ac he teah for a his ealdan wrenceas" . Hence there was in Old English the rare incidence of phrasal verbs with post-verbal particles. However, Denison notes about such examples that the meaning of post-verbal particles in this period was still often very directional in close relationship with a prepositional meaning. Therefore applications of the particle "up" in Old English conveyed a sense of direction upward as in "to grow up(ward)", rather than the completive sense as in "to break up ”，that would become more common in Middle English and beyond.(p37-61)He argues that not until the Peterborough Chronicle did the completive sense appear .

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2.2 The Phrasal Verbs in Middle English as a Productive Form

The formation of prefixed verbs in Old English was no longerin Middle English and the loss of productivity was already evident in Old English, in which certain authors added a post-verbal particle to prefixed verbs possibly because the prefix was losing meaning.[1](p47)Stress patterns also likely account for a shift, as prefixes in Old English compound verbs were unstressed while post-verbal particles carried stress, making them stronger and thus preserving their lexical value. Middle English was also subject to the powerful forces of French and Anglo-Norman, as well to some influence from Old Norse. Several authors on the subject claim that Old Norse which already had a fairly robust incidence of phrasal verbs must have incited the production of English phrasal verbs with post-verbal particles although the degree to which Old Norse is responsible for this is unclear. The rapid borrowing of French verbs into Middle English likely slowed the development of phrasal verbs（p340）because of competition in, as French brought in Romance verbs that could fill the semantic fields of the Old English prefixed verbs. For example, the French borrowing"destroy"could accommodate the meaning of Old English "forbrecan" (break up) . French forms also likely hindered phrasal verbs because of. French was the language of status in England after the Norman Conquest and phrasal verbs, while common by the fourteenth century ，were considered informal. (p123) Nonetheless phrasal verbs regained strong productivity by the fifteenth century .Tanabe notes the occurrence of 162 phrasal verbs in The Paston Letters despite the formal quality of those letters, and the incidence of “to give up" in the Peterborough Chronicle. Middle English underwent a shift infrom many instances of SOV to SVO as it lost manyfrom Old English, becoming a much more or word-order based language. The new VO word order as Akimoto claims, likely enabled the prefixes of Old English to become post-positioned adverbial particles. In other words, Old English "forbrecan" became "to break up". By late Middle English phrasal verbs could be divided into 3 categories: a) Old English-style inseparable particle + verb ( overtake); b) verb + separable particle (take up); and c) compounds derived from the first two (outcry).

2.3 The Rise of the Phrasal Verb in Early Modern English

The incidence of phrasal verbs exploded in Early Modern English. Shakespeare himself applied the form widely throughout the plays. Hiltunen cites a study by Castilloin which 5744 phrasal verbs have been identified within the body of the plays. Nevalainen also notes Spasov's study which analysed 46 plays from the Renaissance to Present-Day English, finding that phrasal verbs remained "below ten per cent of the total of all verbs from his four Early Modern English subperiods, but does exceed the five per cent level from about 1600 onwards." (p423) Hiltunen explains that phrasal verbs were used extensively in Early Modern English dramatic texts because of their variable shades of meaning and productive capacity "to be expanded to form new idioms" (p161). Akimotonotes also that "phrasal verbs occur more frequently in letters and dramas than in essays or academic writing" in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries(p221). This confirms that phrasal verbs occupied a lower social position in Early Modern English than perhaps single Latinate verbs that could fill their semantic fields which gives rise, incidentally, to a syntactic test for phrasal verbs. However, phrasal verbs continued to become entrenched. Stage-threearose, such as "breakdown" and "comeback". The stress on the particle in the verbal form ("I have to break DOWN these boxes) moved from the particle to the verbal component when the compound acted as a noun (as in, "he had a BREAKdown"). Phrasal verbs in Early Modern English also could be formed with a noun + particle such as "to louse up".[7](p319)It was also in this period that objects were firmly established before particles ("She put it on" not *She put on it) as a standard practice while nominal objects retained movement before and after the particle (She put the dress on / She put on the dress).

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