Az Eszterházy Károly Tanárképző Főiskola Tudományos Közleményei. 1998. Vol. 2. Eger Journal of English Studies.(Acta Academiae Paedagogicae Agriensis : Nova series ; Tom. 26)

Studies - Éva Kovács: Identification of phrasal verbs in the literature

vs. The guests came in. or He made up the whole story, vs. He brought up a book (to a child in bed). As far as prepositional verbs are concerned, Palmer distinguishes them from simple sequences of verb and prepositional phrase. E.g: The passenger flew in the plane, vs. The sparrow flew in the plane. He also makes a distinction between intransitive and transitive prepositional verbs, the former being semantically transparent and fairly free syntactically, the latter being semantically and syntactically more restricted. E.g.: He came across the road. He came across the missing papers, vs. He took me for a man he knew. They deprived the children of their rights. This distinction corresponds to Quirk et al.'s Prepositional Verbs Type I and Type II. Palmer also remarks that it has been argued that sometimes prepositions may follow rather than precede the noun phrase and so are 'postpositions.' Examples are: He has travelled the world over. J pass their arguments by. They ran him over. The reason for thinking that these are prepositions rather than adverbs is the fact that they may, with little or no change of meaning, precede the noun phrase in sentences where they are much more plausibly to be regarded as prepositions.: E.g.: He has travelled over the world. I pass by their arguments. They ran over him. Palmer argues, however, that these are merely the adverbial particles of 'marginal' phrasal verbs and not postpositions. 3 Phrasal verbs in the special literature So far I have merely suggested by examples the kinds of combinations that are regarded as phrasal verbs in recent grammar books and dictionaries. At this point it might be useful to compare the terms or labels used in the literature with the term phrasal verb, since these labels are quite similar, but the ranges of complex verbs they designate are not the same. To illustrate the complexity of terms and labels, let us just mention The Oxford Companion to the English Language (1992), which, besides the term 'phrasal verb', refers to terms like 'verb phrase', 'compound verb', 'verb-adverb combination', 'verb-particle construction' (VPC) and AmE 'two-part word/verb' and 'three-part verb' (depending on number of particles). We can see, however, that some authors use phrasal verbs in a narrower, others in a broader sense. 3.1 Phrasal verbs in a narrower sense Some authors exclude prepositional verbs and include both literal and figurative, transitive and intransitive combinations. E.g.: the 'phrasal verb' in 117