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

Prepositional adverbs now usually have the same form as the prepositions that stand before a noun, but in older English, they often had a different form and except in relative clauses, are sometimes still distinguished in the case of out, in, and on in connection with verbs denoting motion from or toward: He came out of (preposition) the house.

' and 'He is now in the house but will soon come out.

' (prepositional adverb). Inflectional prepositions, according to Curme (1931:91) are prepositions which "have often lost a good deal of their original concrete meaning and are no longer felt as prepositions, for they have developed into inflectional particles which indicate definite grammatical relations. E.g.: They depend upon him. That the preposition and the verb have fused into one word, a real compound, can be seen in passive form, where the preposition remains with the verb: He can be depended upon." E. Kruisinga (1932:11) distinguishes 'semicompound' as laugh at from what he calls 'separable verbal compound' like put on, take off: "These groups (i.e. such as laugh at) differ, from the separable verbal compound like to put on, to take off in that the object can never separate the two elements of the group (He put it on., but He laughed at it.)" As pointed out by Live (1965:429), there exists in English a considerable group of basic verbs, each of which is, in certain of its occurrences, closely linked with a particle - adverbial or prepositional - in such a manner as to justify considering the two elements as constituting one discontinuous verb (e.g. look up, - into, -for; make up, - out; carry on, - out, - through; pass off, - in, - over, - up). Mitchell (1958:103) makes a clear distinction, based on the distribution features of particles, between the 'colligation' phrasal verb - noun e.g. He turned off the light, with its positional variant He turned the light off. and the 'colligation' non-phrasal verb-prepositional phrase e.g. He turned off the road., where the positional variation is not possible. Dietrich (1960:9) also makes a clear distinction between adverbs and prepositions and particles which can be used both as an adverb and a preposition. "Den Kategorien der "reinen" Adverbien wie aside, away, back, forth, together usw. und der ausschießlich präpositional gebrauchten Formwörter wie at, for, from, of, till, with usw. steht im Neuenglischen eine Gruppe von Partikeln wie about, above, across, after, along, around, before, behind, below, between, beyond, by, down, in, inside, near, off, on, out, outside, over, past, round, through, throughout, to, under, up usw. gegenüber, die sowohl in adverbialer wie in präpositionaler Verwendung auftreten." Furthermore Dietrich notes "Auch dem Neuhochdeutschen ist diese grammatische Gruppe nicht fremd; man vergleiche z. B. "Ich sah das Bild an", wo an ein Adverb ist (vgl. "Ich wollte das Bild ansehen"), mit 119