phrasal verbs

phrasal verbs

1. A phrasal verb is a combination of verb and adverb or preposition (or both) such as come about, draw up, put up with, and work out. Phrasal verbs formed with adverbs can be either transitive (i.e. take an object, as in He drew up a chair) or intransitive (as in A taxi drew up). Phrasal verbs formed with prepositions are of course transitive (I must go through some papers). Phrasal verbs of all types have meanings that cannot be directly deduced from the individual words, and in some cases they have several meanings and grammatical patterns. For example, run up has four distinct meanings in the sentences She ran up the road, She ran up to meet them, She ran up debts, and She ran up the flag. In the first example, up is a preposition (governing road), whereas in the other three examples it is an adverb, and in the last two the objects debts and flag are governed by the verb ran.

2. When the object of a phrasal verb is a pronoun, it normally comes between the verb and a following adverb, e.g. He took up my references but He took them up. This separability can occur with nouns as well, though not in all cases: I'll get down the book can be converted to I'll get the book down, whereas She heads up a team, cannot be converted to She heads a team up, although down and up are both being used as adverbs in these cases. Whether or not more transparent combinations such as They came down the stairs or She went into the house should be classed as phrasal verbs as distinct from verbs with routine complementation is still the subject of disagreement among grammarians, and this applies also to the extended type The witch turned him into a toad, in which both the verb and the following preposition have their distinct grammatical objects.

3. Phrasal verbs range from the informal to the neutral but are hardly ever formal in register. They form a highly productive area of current English, with recent new formations including bottom out (= level out at the lowest point), chill out (relax), dumb down (= make simpler), factor in (= include in an assessment or survey), freak out (= lose one's temper), and talk up (to stress or exaggerate the importance of). They tend to be informal in use (less so with the first and fourth).

4. Some phrasal verbs produce noun derivatives of the type breakdown, copout, feedback, and tie-in, the reversed form typified by backdrop and outcome, or both (breakout and outbreak). These also vary in register from the neutral (breakdown, breakout, feedback, outbreak) to the informal (copout, tie-in).

5. For a fuller discussion of this topic see The Oxford Companion to the English Language (1992), 772–6.