Az Eszterházy Károly Tanárképző Főiskola Tudományos Közleményei. 2002. Vol. 3. Eger Journal of English Studies.(Acta Academiae Paedagogicae Agriensis : Nova series ; Tom. 29)
Éva Kovács: Properties of Verbs Which Constitute Phrasal Verbs
116 ÉVA KOVÁCS with a direct object noun phrase when a particle is not present. (E.g.: He slept off the effects of the drinking. The student laughed off the failure .) As another syntactic effect, it is often pointed out e.g. by Kennedy that "the object of the combination is of a very different character from that of the simple verb" e.g.: in buy a house / buy out a person, lock a door/ lock out a person , mop a floor / mop Up the water on it, clean a room / clean out its contents. It is also pointed out by Live (1965:437) that many verbs which "remain transitive, co-occur with a different set of objects", e.g.: carry (package) / carry out (threat), test (candidate) / test out (theory). Lipka (1972:176) notes that "when the selection restrictions and the meaning of the VPCs (verb particle constructions) differ considerably from the simplex verb, as in carry out (threat) vs. carry (package), the two are unrelated and the VPC must be regarded as an idiomatic discontinuous verb." One might assume that the two also differ with regard to figurative usage. In some cases the VPCs seem to. be confined to a figurative use, while the corresponding simplex verb occurs only in literal use: E.g.: blossom out (sb/business firm), freeze out (sb), smell out (secret/plot), bottle up (emotion, anger), thrash out (problem, truth). Sinclair's (1991:69—77) discussion of the combination of set + particle justifies some of the observations I made about the syntactic properties of phrasal verbs. The phrasal verb set off can have a noun group inside it. E.g.: It was the hedge which set the garden off. Set in seems to occur typically in a small and/or minor part of a sentence, i.e. the clauses in which set in is chosen are in general rather short, a number of clauses are subordinate and set in shows a clear tendency to end structures. E.g.: ... where the rot set in. The phrasal verb set about is also interesting in that it is regularly followed by an -ing form of another verb and the second verb is normally transitive. Besides, in front of the phrasal verb, there are a number of structures concerning uncertainty: negatives and how; phrases like little idea, the faintest idea, I'm not sure, evidently not knowing. E.g.: She had not the faintest idea of how to set about earning any. The combination set off can be intransitive or transitive. When intransitive, it is followed by a prepositional phrase (very often the preposition is on, for, in, into) E.g.: We set off in his car on the five-thousand-mile journey. When set off is transitive, the object is usually abstract: 'a new round of, a whole series of, 'a reaction '. E.g.: In Austria the broadcast was to set off a train of thought and actions.
