Az Eszterházy Károly Tanárképző Főiskola Tudományos Közleményei. 1996. Vol. 1. Eger Journal of English Studies.(Acta Academiae Paedagogicae Agriensis : Nova series ; Tom. 24)

Péter Antonyi: Phrasal verbs: an attempt at a syntactic account

The ungrammatically of (lb) shows that

'off the customers' (=PP) is not a constituent of the VP 'put off the customers'. However, (lc) supports the claim that 'the customers' is a constituent (NP) and thus it follows that put off is the other subconstituent of the abovementioned VP since 'put and 'off cannot fall into different constituents, as they are adjacent and there is no constituent boundary between them. As the example suggests, phrasal verbs are normally compared with prepositional verbs, which look very similar to them but, in fact, they have different underlying structure. Radford's (1988:90-91) analysis observes the evidence from clefting. The main difference is in the role of the particle; in the first case the particle is an 'adverbial' (traditional terminology) that makes up a complex verb with the lexical verb 'put' (phrasal verbs), whereas with prepositional verbs it functions as the head of the PP following the verb in the sentence. (2) [IP [NP Drunks] [

r would] [

V

P [

v put off] [

N

P the customers]]]] (3) [

I

P [

N

P Drunks] [

r Q would] [

V

P [

v get] [

P

P off the bus]]]] There are a number of other criteria to distinguish between phrasal and prepositional verbs. Let us now contrast the following sentences with prepositional and phrasal verbs as in A University Grammar of English (Quirk and Greenbaum 1973:349). Prepositional verb: call on (visit) (4a) They callcd on the man. (4b) They callcd on him. (4c) * They callcd the man on. (4d) * They callcd him on. (4c) They callcd early on the man. Phrasal verb: call up (summon) (5a) They callcd up the man. (5b) * They callcd up him. (5c) They callcd the man up. (5d) They callcd him up. (5c) * They callcd early up the man. The example sentences isolate some major differences. With the prepositional verb no movement of the preposition to the right of the object NP is allowed, no matter whether it is a real NP or a personal pronoun (4c, 4d). This obviously stems from the fact that we are faced with a PP in which the head (preposition='pre-position') must normally precede its NP complement unless we move the NP out by 92