The evolution of phrasal verbs and their history

Critical Stages in the Evolution of Phrasal Verbs
Although from the very beginning the use of the term phrasal verb implies that the construction is distinctively English, there are comparable verbal constructions in other languages, as already noted by Smith (1925). The most obvious parallels can be found in other Germanic languages. Cf. e.g. present-day German aufgeben ‘give up’, which, like its English translation, consists of a particle (auf, cognate to up) and a verb (geben, cognate to give):
(1) Present-day German Alexander gab das Cellospielen auf Alexander gave the cello:playing up ‘Alexander gave up playing the cello.’ But neither syntactically nor semantically are there always one-to-one correspondences. Cf. e.g. the German verb aufmachen ‘open’ (particle auf and verb machen, cognate to make) in the following example:
(2) Present-day German Wenzel sagt dass Eva die Tür aufmachen wird Wenzel says COMP Eva the door up:make:INF AUX:3SG ‘Wenzel says that Eva will open the door.’ In the modern Germanic languages, the distribution of pre- and postposition of the particle is entirely rule-governed. In those Germanic languages where the particle may either follow the verb as in the first example or precede the verb as in the second example it has long been customary to call such particle verbs separable prefix verbs, a term which obviously cannot be applied to present-day English, where the particle is always separated and behind the verb. In studies with a comparative focus the more neutral term particle verb (or verb-particle construction) is now well-established. Consequently, in this paper this term will be used from a comparative and contrastive point of view, while the term phrasal verb will be reserved for the Modern English verb-particle construction and its peculiarities, especially where the discussion is restricted to English. In Old English, the particle may occur before or after the verb, as in the present-day Continental West Germanic languages, where the alternation between pre- and postposed particles has been historically more stable than in English. Cf. the repeated use of Old English ut-gan ‘go out’ in the following example (note that eod- is the regular suppletive preterite of gan ‘go’ in Old English):
(3) Old English (ÆCHom II, 1 [012700 (10.256)f.]) Gað ut of ðam ofne and cumað to me go:IMP.PL out of the oven and come:IMP.PL to me Hi ðærrihte ut eodon they immediately out go;PRET:PL ‘Come out of the oven and come to me; they immediately came out.’
Thus, the primary syntactic development in the English construction is one towards almost exceptionless postposition of the particles. And while many details of the development have not been fully explained, there is now general agreement that this development is connected to the changes in the basic word order in the history of English. But the normally post-verbal position of the particle in present-day English also has close correspondences in other present-day Germanic languages. Taken together, such parallels in a group of genetically related languages can be regarded as a clear indication of common historical origins. Although shared features may in principle also be the result of convergence and contact, in the present case common ancestry is the only viable explanation. Similarly, the semantic properties of the particle verbs in the various present-day Germanic languages are very much alike. However, in this respect in all the languages the modern stages differ significantly from their earliest stages, where typically compositional combinations of verbs of motion and spatial particles are found, e.g. Old English forþfēran (literally: ‘travel/move away or by’):
(4) Old English (LS 5 (InventCrossNap) & ferde forþ on his weig and went forth on his way ‘and went forth on his way’ Although the non-spatial and non-compositional combinations are slower to emerge, they are also already found in Old English. Thus forþfēran is frequently found in the figurative sense ‘die’:
(5) Old English (LawIne) & fere se ceorl forð and go:PRES.SUBJ.SG the man forth ‘and if the man dies’ Cf. the semantically corresponding phrasal verb pass away in present-day English. This is of course an instance of the readily intelligible and crosslinguistically wide-spread metaphor ‘life is a journey’ (cf. e.g. Lakoff 1993 and the overview in Croft & Cruse 2004: Ch. 8, with further references), used euphemistically.
In fact, all non-literal senses of the verb-particle constructions may be reasonably assumed to have developed out of such metaphorical (or metonymical) uses. The observation that forþgān with its equivalent literal meaning ‘go forth’ does not seem to be used in the sense ‘die’ suggests that this metaphorical use of forþfēran is lexicalized in Old English (note that forþgān in its turn is also used as a gloss of Latin procedere, progredi, praeterire, etc.); cf. DOE s.vv. forþ and forþ-gān. The particle in Old English may either precede or follow the verb, cf. example (3) above. In general, this is entirely independent of the meaning of the Old English verb-particle construction, as a comparison of the following two examples to the preceding examples (4) and (5) shows:
(6) Old English (ÆCHom I, 10 (G) þe big sume weige sæt þær se hælend forð ferde REL by some way sat there the Saviour forth went ‘who was sitting by the way where the Saviour passed by’
(7) Old English (WHom 20.2 [9]) feower geara fæce ær he forð ferde four years’ time before he forth went ‘four years before he died’ On the whole, the semantic developments in the Germanic languages are rather similar and follow the same paths; consequently, the inventories of particles in the various Germanic languages show a considerable, nonaccidental etymological and semantic overlap. Moreover, there is a kind of competition between particle verbs and prefixed verbs (i.e. verbs with ‘inseparable prefixes’), which in all the Germanic languages represent an older type. At closer inspection, though, this older type turns out to be the likely result of even older verb-particle combinations with the particles in preverbal position, i.e. typical instances of Indo-European preverbs in a position predictable from the basic verborder in Germanic. Considering the high probability of OV as the basic word order in Proto-Germanic this is, again, not particularly surprising. In some of the Germanic languages there is a strong tendency for this older type to recede, most notably in the Scandinavian languages, while this tendency is considerably weaker in the Continental West Germanic languages. In English, a further complication lies in the abundant influx of borrowed verbs from French and Latin in the centuries following the Norman Conquest. Quite a few of these are partly synonymous with particle verbs, while the new verbal prefixes borrowed into the language via these loanwords have traditionally been taken to seal the demise of many of the older inherited prefixes. This has been a remarkably confused discussion for a long time. But nevertheless, it is worth being spelt out in some detail, since it is closely connected to the question of the lexical status of the English verb-particle construction from Old English to present-day English, in particular with regard to its stylistic classification. In this context etymological considerations come into play and one must seek an answer to the question why the majority of English verb-particle constructions contain monosyllabic verbs of Germanic descent, while there seem to be restrictions on the use of borrowed and/or polysyllabic verbs. At this point a brief note on the use of period labels in this study may be appropriate.