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

Jespersen's (1924/1968:273-77) attitude towards the problem of adverbs and prepositions is subjective, based on intuitive grounds. According to him, by in pass by is a preposition, if the meaning is local, as in 'The river passes by a small village', but an adverb in the figurative meaning 'pass without taking notice, overlook, disregard'

. These meanings, however, cannot always be kept apart. As regards the collocation see through Jespersen says that through is a preposition in 'We saw through the secret' (discovered what was behind it), but an adverb in 'I'll see him through' (help him to get through); according to him, in this case, too, the distinction is not always observed. L.P. Smith (1923:172) introduces the very term 'phrasal verb' into the linguistic literature. It is worth noting that the work in which he speaks of this category of verbs is entitled "Words and Idioms" and states that the OED Editor Henry Bradley suggested the term to him. The 'phrasal verbs' are introduced as follows: "Even more numerous are the idiomatic collocations of verbs followed by prepositions, or by prepositions used as adverbs. Collocations of this kind, 'phrasal verbs' we may call them, like 'keep down'set up', 'put through', and thousand others, are not only one of the most striking idiosyncrasies of our language, but as we shall have occasion to note later on, they enter as well into a vast number of idiomatic anomalies - phrases with meanings not implied by the meaning of the words which compose them. These phrasal verbs correspond to the compound verbs in synthetic languages. Thus 'fall out' has the meaning of the Latin 'excidere', the German 'ausfallen'. As a matter of fact we have in English both compound and phrasal verbs, often composed of the same elements - 'upgather' and 'gather up', 'uproot

' and 'root up', underlie' and 'lie under'. In these instances the meaning is the same in each, but in other cases the meaning is changed by the grouping of the different elements: 'undergo' and 'go under', 'overtake' and 'take over

' have not the same signification; and 'upset' and 'set up' are almost exactly opposite in meaning." We see from Smith's statement that the problem of whether the particle of the verb-particle collocation is an adverb or a preposition is quite irrelevant for Smith's definition of 'phrasal verbs'. The defining characteristic of Smith's 'phrasal verbs' is that the verb and the particle constitute a semantic unit. W. P. Jowett (1950/51:152) also defines phrasal verbs as "semantic units consisting of verb plus particle." Among his examples we find Adverbs, e.g. If you let the side down we shall fall out (If you don't do your share we shall 121