English Verb-particle Constructions Research Articles

Parallelisms between Verb–Particle Constructions in English and Verb–Verb Compounds in Japanese: Evidence from Acquisition Research

This study shows two parallelisms between (i) the acquisition process of English verb–particle constructions (VPCs) by children in the process of acquiring English as a native language (henceforth ENL children) and (ii) that of Japanese verb–verb compounds (VVCs) by children in the process of acquiring Japanese as a native language (henceforth JNL children) using the CHILDES database. First, both JNL and ENL children produce creative N–N compounds and complex predicates during the same period, in line with the proposal by Snyder that the Compounding Parameter (TCP) is set to positive for both Japanese and English languages. Second, particles or verbs which are used to represent the path of motion in English VPCs and Japanese VVCs are produced before the VPCs and VVCs they are used in because complex predicates are created by the combination of two or more constituents, such as verbs and particles. Thus, our findings corroborate the proposal that Japanese is a [+TCP] language and suggest that Japanese makes use of VVCs instead of VPCs. Furthermore, this parallelism observed among ENL and JNL children in the acquisition process of creative N–N compounds and VPCs/VVCs, respectively, suggests that English VPCs and Japanese VVCs are related expressions in a grammatical sense. This in turn implies that VPCs and VVCs are connected by more than their semantics; indeed, it implies that they are realizational variations of the same abstract linguistic structure.

English-to-Hindi Mapping of Compositional Verb-Particle Constructions

The present study investigates the semantic correspondence in the Hindi translation equivalents of compositional English verb-particle constructions (EVPCs) with the particle up. The compositional constructions include the directional and aspectual functions of particles. The study concentrates on the semantic representation of literal spatial directional and aspectual completive functions of the particle up in Hindi, a major Indian language. The researchers selected some frequent EVPCs, took examples from the British National Corpus and manually translated them into Hindi with the help of relevant dictionaries and corpus resources, including native speaker intuitions. Further, the obtained Hindi translational equivalents were analyzed for morphosyntactic structure and semantic correspondence. The study found that the compositional EVPCs are mapped in Hindi by simple(v) and complex verb constructions(verb/noun/adjective/adverb-verb). The spatial directional sense of the particle up is either lexicalized in the simple Hindi verb or polar verb (v1) of the Hindi compound verb(v1-v2), whereas in Hindi conjunct verb constructions, this directional sense is explicitly realized as a verbal modifier (generally adverb). The vector verb (v2) of the Hindi compound verb appears to map the aspectual-completive sense of the respective particle.

Top-down and bottom-up approaches to teaching English verb-particle constructions

Abstract The present study examines two cognitive linguistics approaches to foreign language teaching. One draws on the conventionality of language use that a variety of expressions can be understood as instances of more general patterns, e.g., kick them out and eat it up as verb-object-particle, whereas the other centers on linguistic creativeness such as novel combinations or associations, e.g., chest down the ball. Noting that English verb-particle constructions (VPCs) exemplify both linguistic conventionality and creativeness, two types of instruction have been developed–namely, top-down instruction and bottom-up instruction. The top-down instruction presents VPCs as instances of conventional argument structures such as motion and resultative constructions (Goldberg, 2015), whereas the bottom-up instruction focuses on creative compositions of literal and metaphorical meanings (Lakoff & Johnson, 1980). The two types of instruction were provided for Korean EFL learners, and their knowledge of VPCs was measured by a pretest, an immediate posttest, and a four-week delayed posttest. Results of the immediate posttest showed that both types of instruction were effective in improving the learners’ knowledge of literal and figurative VPCs. In the delayed posttest, significantly greater retention was observed for the construction-based top-down instruction. This finding highlights the importance of argument structures as super-constructions in teaching VPCs to EFL learners.

Directional Idioms in English and Welsh: A Usage-Based Perspective on Language Contact

Abstract The English verb-particle construction or phrasal verb (pv) has undergone dramatic semantic extensions from the expression of literal motion events (the ball rolled down the hill) – a pattern known as satellite-framing – to idiomatic figurative uses (the company will roll out a new plan) where selection of the particle is motivated by Conceptual Metaphors. Over the course of its long contact with English, Welsh – also satellite-framed with literal motion events – has extended the use of its verb-particle construction to replicate even highly idiomatic English pv s. Through a case study of ten metaphorical uses of up and its Welsh equivalent, we argue that this dramatic contact outcome points to the convergence by bilingual speakers on a single set of Conceptual Metaphors motivating the pv combinations. A residual Celtic possessive construction (lit. she rose on her sitting ‘she sat up’) competes with English-like pv s to express change of bodily posture.

A parametric approach to the acquisition of syntax.

Three case-studies, using longitudinal records of children's spontaneous speech, illustrate what happens when a child's syntax changes. The first, examining acquisition of English verb-particle constructions, shows a near-total absence of commission errors. The second, examining acquisition of prepositional questions in English or Spanish, shows that children (i) may go as long as 9 months producing both direct-object questions and declaratives with prepositional phrases, before first attempting a prepositional question; and (ii) at some point, abrubtly begin producing prepositional questions that are correctly formed for the target language. The third case study shows that in children acquiring English, the onset of verb-particle constructions occurs almost exactly when that child begins using novel noun-noun compounds. After a discussion of the implications for the nature of syntactic knowledge, and for the mechanisms by which it is acquired, two examples are presented of as-yet untested acquisitional predictions of parametric proposals in the syntax literature.

Conceptualizing humans as animals in English verb particle constructions

Author/s
 Klaus-Uwe PantherNanjing Normal University, China, and University of Hamburg, GermanyLinda L. ThornburgNanjing Normal University, China
 
 ABSTRACT
 Verb particle constructions with animal names used as verbs (‘VPrt critter constructions’), such as horse around, clam up, and rat out, are interesting because of their (i) grammatical structure, (ii) pragmatic function, (iii) conceptual content, and (iv) the cultural knowledge they reflect. This chapter focuses on the latter two aspects of critter constructions. More specifically, we assume that an adequate analysis of critter constructions requires folk or cultural models of the animals in question, spatial schemas for the particle, metaphorical mappings and metonymic inferences, and aspectual categories in the sense of Vendler (1957). We place our findings in the larger context of the status of cultural and cognitive models in general. Such models (including animal folk models) are often outdated and reflect centuries-old beliefs that have left their traces in lexico-grammatical structure, in this case, critter constructions.

Processing of the English verb particle construction in adults with aphasia

Background: Verb particles (VPs) are grammatical constructions, consisting of a main verb and a particle (“go out”). Particles are idiomatic, stored as whole units in the lexicon. Jackendoff (2002)...

Underuse of English verb–particle constructions in an L2 learner corpus: Focus on structural patterns and one-word preference

AbstractThis study analyzes English verb–particle constructions (VPC) in a learner and a native corpus of argumentative essays, focusing on two important factors: structural patterns of VPCs and preference for one-word verbs (e. g.,delayvs.put off). The results showed that while every structural type of VPC was significantly underused by L2 learners, greater underuse was observed with discontinuous transitive VPCs (e. g.,bring it back). In addition, the frequency of the most underused VPCs in the learner corpus was significantly lower than that of their one-word synonyms, indicating the learners’ strong preference for one-word verbs. Identifying these specific areas of difficulty when learning VPCs, the author explores how contrastive linguistic analyses and corpus-based quantitative approaches can collaboratively contribute to the investigation of complex interlanguage systems.

Stefan Thim, Phrasal verbs: The English verb–particle construction and its history (Topics in English Linguistics 78). Berlin and New York: De Gruyter Mouton, 2012. Pp. xiv + 302. ISBN 978-3-11-025702-1.

‘How ‘English’ are the phrasal verbs really?’ and how did this highly familiar but often ill-described construction evolve ‘from its early history up to the present’? (p. 1). Thim’s book, which may be considered less as an ambitious empirical investigation of the topic than as a competent critical survey of its literature, aims at answering these two questions. That these questions are intertwined is clear from the answers they receive in this work. First, the phrasal verb is not very special to English. While the term phrasal verb ‘is rarely ever used except with respect to English’ (p. 2), Thim points out, as many scholars have done before him, that there are close parallels to be found in other languages, most notably in the other present-day Germanic languages. For instance, the German prefix verb aufgeben ‘give up’ may occur as two separate words, with the prefix auf (a cognate of up) even obligatorily split from the verb by a Direct Object noun phrase (e.g. Sie gab ihre Arbeit auf ‘She gave up her job’). Thim further cites examples of particle verbs from Danish, Dutch, Norwegian Nynorsk and Swedish, as well as from Afrikaans, Faroese, Icelandic and Yiddish, to support the claim that the English verb-particle construction is certainly not an isolated language-specific phenomenon. Second, these close parallels then help Thim answer the question about the evolution of the ‘English’ phrasal verb, whose origin can be traced back at least to Proto-Germanic. In Indo-European languages more generally, Thim reminds us, prefix verbs and particle verbs have developed out of adverb-verb sequences. And in fact, in various languages belonging to genetically more distant families, particle-like verb prefixes, or ‘preverbs’, have formed out of adverbs, typically derived themselves from previously independent relational nouns. English may look special in that particles now standardly follow the verb, leaving aside exceptional structures of the type In came a strange figure (more on which below). However, in Old English, and still in early Middle English, particles could appear in both preverbal and postverbal position, depending to some extent on clause type (subordinate or main) and finiteness, rather like the separable prefixes we encounter in Continental West-Germanic languages such as present-day Dutch or German. Thim strongly rejects the widespread misconception ‘that there must have been a ‘rise’ of the phrasal verb’ (p. 145), that is, that the phrasal verb was a Middle English or later innovation which superseded an earlier pattern, one with inseparable prefixes. Rather, Thim argues, the apparent emergence of postverbal particles in English is nothing but an epiphenomenon of independent, wellestablished changes in the language system, the most important of which is the long-term shift from basic O(bject)V(erb) order in Proto-Germanic to VO order in Modern English. In Old English, the oldest order, Object – particle – Verb, was typically found in subordinate clauses and occasionally still in main clauses. When the verb started to occupy the second position in clauses (‘V2 movement’), unstressed preverbs that had fused with the verb stem moved along with it as inseparable prefixes. By contrast, preverbs carrying stress (‘particles’) remained independent and stayed behind in final position when the verb itself moved leftward. It was first the finite verb (v) which moved (O prt V v → v O prt V), causing a clausal brace with the non-finite main verb (v … V), but the latter subsequently rejoined the finite verb in a process known as exbraciation (v O prt V → v V O prt). Extraposition of especially heavy objects may have played a role in dissolving the brace and further yielded the alternative structure with the particle immediately following the verb (v V prt O).

Stefan Thim. Phrasal Verbs: The English Verb-Particle Construction and its History

Stefan Thim. Phrasal Verbs: The English Verb-Particle Construction and its History

Stefan Thim, 2012. Phrasal Verbs. The English Verb Particle Construction and its History. Topics in English Linguistics 78. Berlin/Boston: De Gruyter Mouton.

Stefan Thim, 2012. Phrasal Verbs. The English Verb Particle Construction and its History. Topics in English Linguistics 78. Berlin/Boston: De Gruyter Mouton.

Phrasal verbs: The English verb-particle construction and its history by Stefan Thim (review)

Reviewed by: Phrasal verbs: The English verb-particle construction and its history by Stefan Thim Laurel J. Brinton Phrasal verbs: The English verb-particle construction and its history. By Stefan Thim. (Topics in English linguistics 78.) Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton, 2012. Pp. xiv, 302. ISBN 9783110257021. $140 (Hb). Is the phrasal verb a distinctly English feature that arose at a certain stage in the history of the language and belongs to the colloquial register? In this insightful work, Stefan Thim debunks these ‘myths’. The book is a critical examination of the literature, both synchronic and diachronic, on the topic of the phrasal verb (PV) in English (e.g. carry out, use up, get by). It is not an empirical study of the phenomenon (though T summarizes several short studies of PVs that he has undertaken). The book’s major contribution to an understanding of the history of the PV is T’s contention that a Germanic system of preverbs led to both prefixed verbs and verb-particle combinations [End Page 664] (phrasal or particle verbs) and that it was large-scale changes in word order, not movement of the particle, that led ‘towards almost exceptionless postposition of the particles’ (5). After a brief introductory chapter, Ch. 2 (10–73) sets the groundwork for the diachronic study that follows. It discusses the PV in present-day English and other Germanic languages. T begins by proposing an elegant—although perhaps ultimately somewhat simplified—three-way semantic distinction (or cline) between ‘compositional’ PVs, where the particle may be either directional or aspectual in meaning, and ‘noncompositional’ PVs. T argues that although aspectual particles do not express spatial meaning, the resulting PVs are semantically transparent. He insists on the importance of including compositional forms in any discussion of PVs because they provide ‘the diachronic input to the development of aspectual and idiomatic meanings’ (21) and are the only forms that exhibit all of the syntactic behaviors characteristic of PVs. In a comparative section, T argues that PVs of the three semantic types occur in the present-day Germanic languages, though differing positions of the particles are connected to the basic word order of each language; the ‘striking’ similarities ‘point to their shared historical origins’ (46). T places PVs within the realm of word formation, not phraseology, considering them cases of ‘periphrastic word formation’ belonging to the class of complex predicates. That is, PVs are not free syntactic combinations of verbs and particles but are compounds (of verb plus spatial particle) or derivations (of verb plus aspectual particle); noncompositional PVs are ‘lexicalized complex construction[s]’ (65). Further justification for the concept of ‘periphrastic word formation’ and greater consideration of the literature on collocations might have been useful here. Ch. 3 (74–116) provides the core diachronic argument of the book. T begins with arguments for the existence of preverbs in non-Indo-European and Indo-European languages. Preverbs result from the decategorialization of adverbs in preverb position. In an object-verb language such as Germanic, univerbation of some preverb plus verb syntagms yields prefixed verbs, resulting in a synchronic layering of older prefixed verbs and newer preverb-verb combinations. (In other cases, adverbs may be decategorialized as adpositions, a topic not pursued here.) A densely argued discussion of the complexities of Old English word order—one of the ‘most hotly contested area[s] of English historical syntax’ (90)—ensues; it makes for a rather difficult reading for the uninitiated. T argues that preverbs become postpositions because of the general change from OV to VO order, consisting of movement of the verb in the following sequence (see figure 3-2). 1. original order: O prt V v (prt = particle, v = finite verb, V = nonfinite verb) clause brace: v O prt V exbraciation: v V O prt / extraposition of object: v V prt O The patterns of particle verb placement identified by Risto Hiltunen (1983) in his groundbreaking work thus find explanation. In conclusion, ‘what appears to be a positional change of the particle (from “pre” to “postposition”, etc.) on closer inspection turns out to be a set of positional changes of the elements of the verb phrase and of the postpositional trends observable in objects’ (103...

Three forms of English verb particle constructions

In this paper, I analyze a number of disparate behaviors of verbal particles in English verb particle constructions. I argue that there are three distinct structural configurations for verb particle constructions in English. English has two distinct forms of small clause particle constructions. In one the small clause is embedded by the root; in the other the predicate of the small clause embeds the root. English also has a complex head particle construction, where the particle is an unmodified head which occupies an argument position. The root embedding small clause particle can co-occur with the complex head particle—but no other combination of particles is permitted.

How to pick out token instances of English verb-particle constructions

We propose a method for automatically identifying individual instances of English verb-particle constructions (VPCs) in raw text. Our method employs the RASP parser and analysis of the sentential context of each VPC candidate to differentiate VPCs from simple combinations of a verb and prepositional phrase. We show that our proposed method has an F-score of 0.974 at VPC identification over the Brown Corpus and Wall Street Journal.

Revisit of English Verb Particle Constructions

Revisit of English Verb Particle Constructions

Deep lexical acquisition of verb–particle constructions

This paper proposes a range of techniques for extracting English verb-particle constructions from raw text corpora, complete with valence information. We propose four basic methods, based on the output of a POS tagger, chunker, chunk grammar and dependency parser, respectively. We then present a combined classifier which we show to consolidate the strengths of the component methods.

Particle placement in early child language: A multifactorial analysis

Recent studies of the English verb particle construction have shown that particle placement varies with a variety of linguistic features, which seem to influence the speaker’s choice of a particular position. The current study investigates whether children’s use of the particle varies with the same features as in adult language. Using corpus data from two English-speaking children, we conducted a multifactorial analysis of six linguistic variables that are correlated with particle placement in adult language. Our analysis reveals significant associations between the position of the particle and two of the six variables, the NP type of the direct object and the meaning of the particle, suggesting that children as young as two years of age process at least some of the features that motivate particle placement in adult speakers.

Intuitions in linguistic argumentation

Generative grammarians have relied on introspective intuitions of well-formedness as their primary source of data. The overreliance on this one type of data and the unsystematic manner in which they are collected cast doubt on the empirical basis of a great deal of syntactic theorizing. These concerns are illustrated with examples and one more detailed case study, concerning the English verb-particle construction.

Domain Minimization in English Verb-Particle Constructions

The placement of the particle before or after an object in the English verb-particle construction is influenced by a variety of factors. We argue that many of them can be subsumed under a single simple principle, motivated by considerations of processing efficiency: to the extent that the domains of syntactic and semantic dependencies can be minimized, processing is facilitated. We use a more precise formulation of this idea to make several predictions about the distribution of particles based on the size of the object NP and the semantic dependencies among the verb, the particle, and the object. Corpus studies confirm the predictions, providing evidence for the principle of domain minimization.

Figuring out figure out. Metaphor and the semantics of the English verb-particle construction

Figuring out <i>figure out. </i>Metaphor and the semantics of the English verb-particle construction