A fine-grained qualitative and quantitative analysis of phrasal verbs covering almost 400 years, based on large amounts of empirical evidence.

This book offers a new account of the transitive particle verb construction in English. The main emphasis is on the alternation between the two word orders possible in English (continuous: hand in the manuscript vs. discontinuous: hand the manuscript in). The central aim is to show that the choice of the word order is not optional as has often been claimed in related literature on the topic and that a syntactic analysis should thus not be based on optional movement operations or optional feature selection. The author argues in some detail that the choice of the word order is determined to a great extent by the information structuring of the context in which the relevant construction is embedded. The syntactic structure she develops is based on a substantial combination of empirical facts, evidence from theoretical research and the results of two experimental studies on the intonation patterns of the construction.

Eat up the apple or Eat the apple up? Is there any difference in the messages each of these alternative forms sends? If there isn't, why bother to keep both? On the other hand, is there any semantic similarity between eat the apple up and break the glass to pieces? This study takes a fresh look at a still controversial issue of phrasal verbs and their alternate word order applying sign-oriented theory and methodology. Unlike other analyses, it asserts that there is a semantic distinction between the two word order variants phrasal verbs may appear in. In order to test this distinction, the author analyzes a large corpus of data and also uses translation into a language having a clear morphological distinction between resultative/non-resultative forms (Russian). As follows from the analysis, English has morphological and syntactic tools to express resultative meaning, which allows suggesting a new lexico-grammatical category – resultativeness.

Providing a detailed and comprehensive account of the development of phrasal verbs from early modern to present-day English, this study covers almost 400 years in the history of English, and provides both a diachronic and synchronic account based on over 12,000 examples extracted from stratified electronic corpora. The corpus analysis provides evidence of how registers can inform us about the history of English, as it traces and compares the usage and stylistic drifts of phrasal verbs across ten different genres - drama, fiction, journals, diaries, letters, medicine, news, science, sermons, and trial proceedings. The study also sheds new light on the morpho-syntactic and semantic features of phrasal verbs, proposing a new approach to the category, considering not only on their grammatical features, but also their historical development, by discussing the category in terms of a number of central mechanisms of language change.