In all present-day Germanic languages there are verb-particle constructions which are very similar to the English phrasal verbs, cf. the following examples (objects are underlined):
(133) Swedish (Braunmüller 1999: 65) Vi målade över tapeten med grön färg.
‘We painted over the wallpaper with green paint.’
(134) Danish (Braunmüller 1999: 65)
Vi malede tapetet over med grøn farve.
‘We painted the wallpaper over with green paint.’
(135) Norwegian (Askedal 1994: 262) Boka kjem ut i neste veke.
‘The book comes out next week.’
(136) Icelandic (Thráinsson 1994: 175) Fjöldi manns tók bækurnar fram.
‘Many people took the books out.’
(137) Faroese (Barnes & Weyhe 1994: 211) Hann las brævid upp.
‘He read the letter out.’
(138) Dutch (Booij 2002b: 21) Hans belde zijn moeder op.
‘Hans rang his mother up.’
(139) West Frisian (Hoekstra 2001: 93) De plysie siket it hûs troch.
‘The police search the house through.’
(140) German
Iss die Qualle auf.
‘Eat the jellyfish up.’
(141) Yiddish (Jacobs, Prince & van der Auwera 1994: 407) Ikh heyb on.
‘I heave on (i.e. start).’
The similarities are quite striking and point to their shared historical origins which will be discussed in detail in the historical account in Chapter 3.
From a contrastive point of view, there are such remarkable parallels in principle on the one side and variation in detail on the other. Let us there-fore have a brief exemplary look at the major parallels and discrepancies in order to place the English construction within its wider Germanic context.
The discussion in this section is restricted to the standard varieties of the languages in question; Luxembourgeois and Pennsylvania German will not be discussed here, but the general observations in this section also apply to these two languages.
The three main semantic types of phrasal verbs discussed above for English (i.e. compositional, aspectual and idiomatic combinations) may indeed be found in each of the present-day Germanic languages, as examples (133)–(141) indicate. Although the examples are restricted to one per language, every present-day Germanic language has all three semantic types (cf. e.g. the contributions in König & van der Auwera 1994). Thus example (136) from Icelandic is compositional, with the corresponding English gloss ‘take out’, while example (140) from German is aspectual, again with the corresponding English gloss ‘eat up’. Example (141) from Yiddish is idiomatic and would yield a literal translation *‘heave on’. For a semantic account of the particles in one Germanic language, see e.g. the description of German ‘separable prefixes’ in Fleischer & Barz (1995: § 5.3.3.3).
2.5.1. Basic word order
As regards element order, there is significant variation among the Germanic languages, both with respect to the relative order of verb and particle and with respect to the relative order of the particle and an object. Quite clearly, though, in all the Germanic languages the relative order of verb and particle is connected to the basic word order (cf. Holmberg & Rijkhoff 1998). Dis-cussing basic word order is beset with pitfalls, since any statement depends on what elements are seen as constitutive of word order, in what kind of clauses, and on the basis of what kind of theoretical framework, so that a simple collection of descriptive data for different languages can turn into a lengthy journey. To take one example, reference grammars of Modern German (e.g. Eisenberg 2006, Engel 1988, Helbig & Buscha 2001, Sitta 1998) describe the position of elements in the clause primarily with respect to the sentence brace, which in declarative main clauses with a finite main verb and a ‘separable prefix’ (i.e. a verb particle) is established by the verb and the particle; i.e., these grammars do not explicitly describe the position of the particle in such clauses, but rather the position of all other elements relative to verb and particle (for contrastive and typological discussions of the sentence brace, word order and particle verbs in present-day German, see the contributions in Lang & Zifonun 1996, with further references).
The brief discussion here focuses on the position of the verb in declara-tive main and subordinate clauses, especially with regard to the V-2 phenomenon; cf. e.g. Harbert (2007: 398): “the V-2 phenomenon is the requirement, apparently holding under at least some circumstances in all of the GMC [viz. Germanic] languages, that the final verb of the clause be no further from the beginning of the clause than second position (not counting conjunctions)”. Holmberg & Rijkhoff (1998: 79) characterize V-2 as
“perhaps the most salient ‘special’ feature of the Germanic languages, distinguishing Germanic from all the other modern European languages”.
Among the present-day Germanic languages, Afrikaans, Dutch, Frisian and German may be characterized as V-2/V-F, i.e. (leaving aside the details of the sentence brace and various exceptions, which, however, do not affect the validity of the general distinction) in declarative main clauses the finite verb is in second position (V-2), but in subordinate clauses the verb is in final position (V-F). The other Germanic languages may be characterized as V-2 or V-3, i.e. the finite verb either must follow the first element immediately (V-2), or there may be another intervening element (V-3). The Continental West Germanic languages (i.e. all except for English) are often labelled ‘OV’ languages (since they have the order ‘object-verb’ in all clauses not affected by the V-2 rule), while English and the Scandinavian
languages may be labelled ‘VO’ languages (since practically all main and subordinate clauses only have the order ‘verb-object’; for Yiddish, cf. fn. 6 below). As is well-known, English is rather strictly V-3 and ‘SVO’ (i.e. the verb may normally be preceded only by the subject and by an additional adverbial: the verb may be the second or the third element, but it must fol-low the subject, and consequently English is the only Germanic language without pervasive V-2); the Scandinavian languages, though, are normally V-2 (i.e. the subject need not precede the verb, but the verb must not be preceded by more than one element: the verb must be the second element;
but subordinate clauses tend to be V-3; cf. Askedal 2005). But the topic is rather intricate in detail and, as Harbert (2007: 398) points out, “has been treated as the central problem of GMC syntax in recent years, and its analysis has been the subject of a vast literature”; cf. e.g. Askedal (1995), Braunmüller (1982 and 1999), König & van der Auwera (1994) and Har-bert (2007: 398–415).
2.5.2. Particle position
In those languages where the word order is strictly VO (V-2 or V-3), the particle will normally follow the verb, while in the languages with a mixed VO/OV (V-2/V-F) order, the particle will precede its verb in final position but follow its verb in non-final position. By inference, one way of summa-rizing the positional properties of the particles in all Germanic languages could be to observe that the particle will normally precede its verb when it is final, but follow the verb in all other cases.6
Thus Afrikaans, Dutch, Frisian and German show preverbal position of the particle in subordinate clauses and, more generally, wherever the verb is clause-final; cf. the following examples from Afrikaans (i) and their Ger-man equivalents (ii):
6 One exception to this appealingly simple rule (which, it should be stressed, is an observation and not an explanation), can be found in Yiddish, where we find sentences such as Er vet avek-šikn dem briv ‘He will off-send the letter’
(but Er šikt avek dem briv ‘He sends off the letter’; examples from Jacobs 2005: 239, following den Besten & Moed-van Walraven 1986), where the exceptional order may be interpreted as one of several remnants of earlier OV. But be that as it may, Yiddish with its rather special history among the Germanic languages, especially with respect to its contact languages, may be the exception that proves the rule; cf. e.g. Jacobs, Prince & van der Auwera (1994) and in particular Jacobs (2005).
(142) i. Ek skakel die lig nou af.
ii. Ich schalte das Licht jetzt aus.
I turn the light now off ‘I’m turning the light off now.’ 7
(143) i. Ek het vergeet om die lig af te skakel.
ii. Ich habe vergessen, das Licht auszuschalten.
I have forgotten (for) the light off-to-turn ‘I forgot to turn off the light.’
(144) i. Ek skal die lig afskakel.
ii. Ich werde das Licht ausschalten.
I will the light off-turn ‘I’ll turn off the light.’
The traditional term separable prefix verb for the particle verbs in these languages is rather unfortunate for a number of reasons. These reasons have been listed succinctly by Booij (2002a and b) for Dutch, but they apply equally to Afrikaans, Frisian and German: “The basic reason why SCVs [viz. ‘separable complex verbs’, which include particle verbs] have to be considered as word combinations, and not as prefixed words, is that they are separable” (Booij 2002a: 206). By the same token, Mahler’s (2002) proposal to analyse the particles as affixes (prefixes in Old English and suf-fixes in Modern English) should be treated with a good degree of caution, especially since his evocation of functionalist principles is, to my mind, not a satisfactory argument in favour of adding to the great terminological con-fusion by labelling an element which may stand separated before or after the verb as ‘prefix’, a term commonly (and sensibly) reserved to bound morphemes in pre-position (cf. e.g. the definition by Marchand 1969: § 3.1.2.1). Mahler’s (2002: 527) claim that particle verbs consist of a free lexical morpheme and a bound derivational morpheme is not only empiri-cally dubious (e.g. eke out, come in: eke is not free, and in is not bound) but also methodologically: For one thing, it is not sufficiently justified by the observation that ‘prefix’ is a functional and ‘particle’ a structural term so that the derivational function of affixes can be structurally realized by par-ticles since it does not follow from this that the function of a particle needs to be ‘prefix’. It also introduces implicitly the assumption that tmesis is a
7 The Afrikaans examples are from Donaldson (1993: 374), their German translations are mine; note the partly different orthographic conventions in the two languages when the particle precedes the verb. For parallel examples from Frisian, see e.g. Tiersma (1985: 109).
historical process operating on verbs and their prefixes rejected in Indo-European linguistics for the same reason: prefixes develop out of particles, not vice versa (cf. e.g. Baldi 1979 and the relevant studies discussed in Chapter 3 below, especially Kuryłowicz 1964: 171 and the overview in Fritz 2005: 22–35). In the Germanic languages, the particle in preverbal position differs from an inseparable prefix in that it is stressed; also, the infinitival particle TO and the past participle prefix GE-8 stand between the particle and the verb. This order is a further strong argument against analysing the particles of the ‘separable prefix verbs’ as prefixes since the normal order of affixes in any kind of derivation is inflectional prefixes – derivational prefixes – root – derivational suffixes – inflectional suffixes;
“derivation creates lexemes, inflection creates forms of lexemes”, as Booij (2007: 71) reminds us. Bybee (1985) provides ample cross-linguistic evi-dence for this observation, which confirms Greenberg’s relevant universalist claim (1966); for a cross-linguistic discussion see also Hall (2000). Thus we have, for example, two prosodically distinct German verbs
´überfahren ‘pass over, traverse’ as in (145) with a ‘separable’ prefix, i.e. a verb-particle construction, and über´fahren ‘to run someone down (with a car, bike etc.)’ as in (146) with an inseparable prefix, with different mean-ing and syntax:
(145) Er hat versucht, früh überzufahren.
he has tried early over-to-drive
‘He tried to pass over early.’
(146) Er hat versucht, einen Hund zu überfahren.
he has tried a dog to over-drive
‘He tried to run down a dog.’
Likewise, similarly parallel prefix and particle verbs are always possible in Swedish, where the prefix verbs tend to be figurative, e.g. Skogsarbetarna bröt av alla grenar och kvistar ‘break off (branches and twigs from a tree)’
vs. Polisen avbröt diskussionen ‘break off (a discussion)’ (examples from Braunmüller 1999: 77; cf. also Svenonius 1996: 19 for examples from Danish and Norwegian). But, again, this corresponds to English and the other West Germanic languages, where prefix verbs of the type outrun also exist. Moreover, this is entirely in line with cross-linguistic evidence from
8 The small capital letters here indicate reference to the infinitival particles cognate to English to and the past participle prefixes cognate to German ge- in all Germanic languages.
non-Indo-European languages, where similar pairings are well-attested (cf.
e.g. the discussion of Georgian preverbs by Harris & Campbell 1995: 95;
for a description of the usage in Swedish and for a comparison between English and Swedish, see also Lindelöf 1935: 258–261). Frisian is reported to prefer verb-particle constructions to inseparable prefix verbs also in cases where German and Dutch have the latter, e.g. Frisian ´oerride as in in hûn oer te riden ‘to run down a dog’ vs. German über´fahren as in (146) above and Dutch over´rijden as in een hond to overrijden; cf. Hoekstra (2001: 93). Theoretical implications of the relation between meaning and separability are also discussed by van der Auwera’s (1999), with respect to verbal prefixation in Dutch.
In English and the North Germanic languages, on the other hand, the particle always follows the verb, with some minor exceptions like the fronting of particles discussed above, cf. examples (9), (81) and (82) (for the order of verb and particle in the Scandinavian languages, see examples (133)–(137) above and (148)–(153) below). In this respect, word order pat-terns in these languages are identical. As in all the Germanic languages, though, (inseparable) prefix verbs may occur, and especially in the Scandi-navian group there may be considerable overlap between these and the particle verbs. Cf. e.g. the Norwegian example (135) from Nynorsk with a postposed particle and the following synonymous example from Bokmål (Askedal 1994: 262):
(147) Boken utkommer i neste uke.
book out-comes in next week
‘The book is going to come out next week.’
Moreover, there is some remarkable cross-Scandinavian variation with respect to the order of particle and object. In Norwegian and in Icelandic the rules are just like the rules in English. Thus we find the familiar English pattern also in sentences such as (148)–(151) from Norwegian (i) and from Icelandic (ii) (examples (148)–(153) are from Svenonius 1996: 11–18):
(148) i. Vi kastet ut hunden.
ii. Við hentum út hundinum.
we threw out dog i. & ii. ‘We threw out the dog.’
(149) i. Vi kastet hunden ut.
ii. Við hentum hundinum út.
we threw dog out i. & ii. ‘We threw the dog out.’
(150) i. Vi kastet den ut.
ii. Við hentum honum út.
we threw it out
i. & ii. ‘We threw it out.’
(151) i. *Vi kastet ut den.
ii. *Við hentum út honum.
we threw out it (Cf. English *We threw out it.)
But in Danish (iii) and Swedish (iv), the positional options are more restricted; cf. (152) and (153), and also examples (133) and (134) above:
(152) iii. Boris flyttet møblene rundt.
Boris moved furniture around iv. *Johan skrev numret upp.
Johan wrote number up
(153) iii. *Boris flyttet rundt møblene.
iv. Johan skrev upp numret.
iii. ‘Boris moved the furniture around.’
iv. ‘Johan wrote down the number.’
According to Svenonius (1996: § 4.3), the rules in Faroese seem to be similar to those in Danish (but Holmberg & Rijkhoff 1998: 86 state they are similar to those of Icelandic; considering the genealogical proximity to Icelandic and the heavy influence from Danish none of these statements seems implausible, but Faroese positional syntax is not a particularly well-studied topic, cf. Braunmüller 1999: § 5.5.1 and in particular Thráinsson et al. 2004). In Danish only the order object–particle is possible, but in Swe-dish only the order particle–object is possible, even in cases where it is not normally possible in English, cf. the following Swedish examples (from Holmes & Hinchliffe 1994: § 656):
(154) Skriv upp det!
write up it
‘Write it down!’
(155) Jag ringer upp dem.
I ring up them
‘I will ring them up.’
(156) Låt mig stänga av den.
let me close off it
‘Let me switch it off.’
That is to say, the English rule that requires pronoun objects to stand between the verb and the particle does not exist in Swedish, where the particle precedes all kinds of objects.
Similarly, the serialization rules in the Continental West Germanic languages (except for Yiddish, where the straightforward identification as a West Germanic language is problematic) are not completely alike, despite the correspondences in principle. For example, a number of serializations in Dutch (i) are not possible in German (ii) (examples from van der Auwera 1995: 88; cf. there for examples of some further differences):
(157) i. … om het boek terug te sturen … for the book back to send ii. … um das Buch zurückzuschicken … for the book back-to-send
i. & ii. ‘… in order to send back the book’
(158) i. … om het boek terug te kunnen sturen … for the book back to can send
… om het boek te kunnen terug sturen … for the book to can back send ii. … um das Buch zurückschicken zu können … for the book back-to-send to can i. & ii. ‘… in order to be able to send back the book’
(159) i. … dat ik hem op wilde bellen … that I him up wanted ring … dat ik hem wilde opbellen … that I him wanted up-ring ii. … dass ich ihn anrufen wollte … that I him on-call wanted i. & ii. ‘… that I wanted to ring him up’
But although these examples may be taken as evidence that the separable preverbs are less free in German than in Dutch, as van der Auwera (1995:
87) observes, it is worth pointing out that the relative order of verb, particle
and object remains predictable from their general positional properties in Germanic.
To conclude, the verb-particle construction is a common property of the Germanic languages, with considerable semantic and syntactic cor-respondences between the different members of the Germanic family: the semantic and syntactic properties of the English phrasal verbs are in essen-tial aspects identical to those of the particle verbs in the other Germanic languages. Moreover, as will be argued in Chapter 6 below, their stylistic properties are likewise very similar. Studies of the English verb-particle construction would be well advised to bear these observations in mind, and to distinguish between general Germanic and specific English characteris-tics of the phrasal verbs. Although this may sound like a complete truism, very many accounts of the English phrasal verbs are seriously hampered by the misconception that the phrasal verbs are particularly ‘English’. Simi-larly, Olsen (1997) states:
Alle germanischen Sprachen haben Partikelverben ausgebildet. Insofern stellen Partikelverben ein gesamtgermanisches Phänomen dar, einzelsprachliche Aus-prägungen der Partikelverben dürfen daher nicht als eine isolierte Spracher-scheinung behandelt werden … ein zu eng gefaßter Blick [kann] gerade in bezug auf das Englische zu verzerrten Ergebnissen über das Wesen der Partikelverben in dieser Sprache verleiten. (Olsen 1997: 45)
[‘Particle verbs have developed in all Germanic languages. Thus particle verbs are a common Germanic phenomenon, and the particle verbs in any of these languages should not be treated as an isolated linguistic characteristic … in particular with respect to English, a focus which is too narrow may lead to dis-torted results regarding the nature of the particle verbs in the language.’]
One striking aspect in this connection is to do with English lexicogra-phy. There is a considerable number of specialized dictionaries of ‘phrasal verbs’ (cf. Herbst & Klotz 2009; the inverted commas are meant to indicate that often in these dictionaries the term also covers prepositional verbs and even other kinds of verbal constructions), usually aimed at learners of English as a foreign language, most notably vol.1 of Cowie & Mackin’s Oxford Dictionary of Current Idiomatic English (1975, new ed. 2006 as Oxford Phrasal Verbs Dictionary for Learners of English), but also e.g.
Meyer (1975), McArthur & Atkins’ Dictionary of English Phrasal Verbs and their Idioms (1992), Longman Phrasal Verbs Dictionary (2000), Mac-millan Phrasal Verbs Plus (2005) Cambridge Phrasal Verbs Dictionary (2006), etc. These dictionaries very much reflect (and promote) the view that the phrasal verb is a separate and particularly difficult area of the Eng-lish lexicon, which is quite characteristic of the language. As will be argued
below, it is only this kind of evaluation of the construction that is typical of
below, it is only this kind of evaluation of the construction that is typical of