The evolution of phrasal verbs and their history

THE EVOLUTION OF PHRASAL VERBS AND THEIR HISTORY
Abstract
Modern English language has a particularly large number of combinations of postpositions with verbs. Their number is growing steadily. This is evidenced by books, dictionaries, dedicated to phrasal verbs and their use. Phrasal verbs that are more infrequently used in conversation have already moved to the language of the media, business and economy. Phrasal verbs have strengthened their position in the verbal lexicon of contemporary English. Yet, there is another important concern of studying deeper the history and evolution of them until it has achieved to its present day status. In this article main considerations go towards highlighting these critical periods.
Key words: phrasal verb, preposition, adverb, particle, semantics, idioms, analytical forms, semantics, compound verbs, auxiliary verb
Introduction
In the 20th century phrasal verbs came to be one of the favourite topics not only of grammarians and lexicographers, but also of authors of popular style guides; only few properties of English are commonly seen as more typical of the language than the phrasal verb. The above quotation from the Preface to Johnson’s dictionary shows that this view goes back at least to the middle of the 18th century, when many of the modern notions concerning the distinctive properties of the English language were first expressed. So powerful have these notions been that one obvious question has in fact rarely been asked, namely: how ‘English’ are the phrasal verbs really? One aim of this section is to explore this question. The other aim is to trace the evolution of the Modern English phrasal verb from its early history up to the present. Obviously, both aims are closely connected, since the peculiarities of the Modern English construction are bound to remain indistinct unless one is ready to adopt a historical, contrastive and cross-linguistic perspective. The dichotomy of synchrony vs. diachrony has led to deplorable limitations of linguistic interests and insights throughout much of the 20th century. Over the past years, the traditional dichotomy has been transcended by a large body of usage-based functionalist, variationist and typological research, whose stance has been summed up by Bybee (2010: 104) as follows: “Language change is not just a peripheral phenomenon that can be tacked on to a synchronic theory; synchrony and diachrony have to be viewed as an integrated whole”. Thus, the wide scope of the present study does not exclude the language of today, which we regard as essentially situated in a historical variational space (see e.g. Oesterreicher 2001 and the references provided there). In the following chapters a description of the main characteristics of the verb-particle construction in present-day English will be taken as a starting point from whence the development of its structural properties will be sketched in the light of previous research and of traditional attitudes. We have come to believe that many of the problems of analysis which have beset the discussion of phrasal verbs for a long time are best solved within a constructional framework, not least if historical developments are to be accounted for as well; the present study is decidedly functionalist (cf. e.g. Dik 1997, Traugott 2003a, Croft 2006, Fischer 2007, Haspelmath 2008 and 2010, Bybee 2010 and Smirnova & Mortelmans 2010).