Although there is quite an extensive literature on phrasal verbs, Rodríguez-Puente's data-rich and comprehensive study presents valuable new insights by focusing on their characteristics and diachrony from the final part of Early Modern English through the so far neglected Late Modern period and up to 1990. The investigation is based on the view that phrasal verbs are a fuzzy category with great internal variability and without a definite boundary, a fact which reflects the gradual and non-simultaneous change of category members. Basically, phrasal verbs are here defined as ‘a type of multi-word verb consisting of a verb and an (originally) adverbial particle bearing a strong semantic unity typical of a single-word verb’ (p. 104), whose characteristics and relevance are surveyed in chapter 1 and then elaborated in great detail in chapter 3. While there are some tendencies noted as to the kinds of verbs forming phrasal verbs, the particles are given more detailed attention and are classified into literal, aspectual/aktionsart, metaphorical and idiomatic types as well as a new ‘emphatic’ category. This type does not change the meaning of the combination as such, but adds intensity and a colloquial touch, the latter in particular with Latinate verbs. Partly based on these particle classes, a more extensive semantic categorization of the combinations than so far extant is proposed, comprising literal, semi-idiomatic, idiomatic, aspectual/aktionsart, reiterative and emphatic phrasal verbs. While the categorization is overall convincing, the labels ‘reiterative’ and, partly, ‘emphatic’ are perhaps not the most felicitous. The former here refers to repetition of meaning between verb and particle (as opposed to reiterative meaning of the whole combination), and ‘emphatic’ does not capture the colloquial aspect, which seems to be a very relevant characteristic. Nevertheless, both types help to make more sense of those combinations that have often been regarded as containing a simply ‘redundant’ particle. A total of fourteen syntactic tests are then introduced, of which only three are accepted as clearly distinguishing phrasal verbs from other verb categories (the definite NP test, the adverb phrase insertion test, and non-occurrence of the particle before relative and interrogative pronouns), supported by the particle placement test. Seven further tests may help to distinguish degrees of bondedness of phrasal verbs (e.g. passivization, particle preposing), whereas four other tests (e.g. action nominalization) are regarded as completely unreliable. The various sub-classifications, the different status of individual tests and the laudable retention of literal types within the category help to get a grip on the gradience within the class of phrasal verbs.
The concept of gradience is further developed in chapter 4. Many but by no means all particles are accepted as grammaticalized, thus placing some on a continuum. The combinations as a whole are also characterized as situated in various positions on the two independent clines of lexicalization and idiomatization, the former based on degrees of syntactic cohesion as shown by the tests introduced in chapter 3 and the latter on degrees of semantic transparency from literalness at one end to idiomaticity at the other. The results, which are illustrated with bring up, eat up and take up, are correlated with Brinton & Traugott's (Reference Brinton and Traugott2005) cline of lexicality, yielding partially fixed (L1), semi-idiosyncratic (L2) and unanalysable idiosyncratic (L3) phrasal verbs. A particularly noteworthy and welcome focus of this chapter is the detailed treatment of idiomaticization in terms of processes at work and resultant outputs. Five pathways, the first with subtypes, are suggested, namely (1) semantic development from literal combinations by (a) metonymy, e.g. clear out, (b) metaphor, e.g. bring up ‘educate’, (c) aspectual particle + metaphorization, e.g. give up ‘yield’, or (d) specialization, e.g. put down ‘write’, (2) reduction of elements, e.g. get across (the footlights), (3) syntactic reanalysis, e.g. keep a look out > keep (an eye) out, (4) direct formation, e.g. veg out and (5) analogy. On the whole, this is a very convincing attempt at bringing some order to the seemingly messy semantic range of phrasal verbs. Diachronic frequency information for selected types helps corroborate the proposed developments. Nevertheless, the categories seem not to be completely mutually exclusive, e.g. hang up in the context of phone calls is explained as a specialization here, but (1a), (1b) or (2) might be equally possible classifications.
The research concentrates on British English (BrE) and on three corpora, namely the complete Representative Corpus of Historical English Registers, version 3.1 (ARCHER), parts of the Old Bailey Corpus (OBC) and of the British part of the International Corpus of English (ICE-GB), but additionally draws on a great variety of data sources, including also other varieties (see pp. 8–9). The core British English (BrE) data set from ARCHER, an OBC subcorpus and legal data from ICE (all described in detail in chapter 2) spans the period 1650 to 1990 and amounts to 1,729,174 words. With ten genres distributed across the clines of speech-related versus writing-based and writing-purposed as well as formal versus informal types (p. 43), it constitutes a very suitable corpus for the investigation of phrasal verbs, for which issues of (in)formality have been discussed somewhat controversially in the literature (e.g. Thim Reference Thim2012). The diversity of the data is not fully reflected in the choice of illustrative examples throughout the book, however, as ARCHER examples seem to dominate more than their share of the data would warrant.
The corpus analysis yields 13,438 phrasal verbs, whose characteristics and distributions are described in detail in chapters 5 and 6. Chapter 5 deals first with frequency issues of phrasal verbs and their component parts. In total, 1,765 distinct types were found, realized by 713 verbal elements and 33 particles. The findings on verbs and particles largely confirm the tendencies found in previous literature. Monosyllabic or initially stressed disyllabic verbs and those of Germanic origin make up the majority of types. The rarer polysyllabic and foreign-derived verbs are found more frequently in the past than in more recent periods. The most common verbs, which are also generally high-frequency items, each combine with many different particles. Particles considered in this study include aback, aboard, about, above, across, after, ahead, along, apart, around, aside, astray, asunder, away, back, behind, by, counter, down, forth, forward(s), home, in, off, on, out, over, past, round, through, to, together, under, up (based on Claridge Reference Claridge2000). Of those only after did not turn up results. The topmost frequent particles are up and out, followed by down, away, in, off, back and on, while astray, asunder, to, aback, under, above and counter proved to be rare. Whereas many particles increased over time, forth exhibits a strong decline over the period under investigation. The distribution of particles across time and genres is documented in detail in the appendices. Regarding the combinations as a whole, there are 925 hapaxes and 246 types occurring only twice, while the top twenty items have more than 100 occurrences each; in fact, first-ranked go out is attested 370 times and second-ranked come in 332 times. The top twenty contain highly productive elements, e.g. the verbs go and come are found six times each, followed by three combinations with take. The treatment of the frequency development of phrasal verbs shows nicely how much depends both on the specific corpus and on the methodology used. While the combined ARCHER and OBC data show 1750–99 to be the peak period, before which phrasal verbs are on the rise and after which they decline again, the ARCHER data alone own exhibit a wavering development up to 1849, but from 1850 onwards a clear rise. With regard to productivity, the type–token ratio calculation identifies 1800–49 as the most productive period, whereas the aggregation of new types method (Palmer Reference Palmer2015) gives the highest figures for 1950–90 and the lowest ones for the respective second halves of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. This latter method seems to yield the more trustworthy figures, but, as Rodríguez-Puente admits, nevertheless neither result provides the full picture, as only new formal types, not new semantic types have been considered in the analysis. As the positing of new senses is a tricky issue such an inclusion would perhaps have been problematic, however. The semantic analysis of pick up on pp. 185–6, for example, shows as many as nine separate idiomatic senses alone, where it could be argued that the senses illustrated by examples (60)–(65), e.g. ‘make a casual acquaintance’, ‘take into custody’, ‘take into one's company’, are all just one sense, roughly ‘collect something/somebody, take with one’. Using all these senses in the productivity analysis might have overestimated productivity.
The second focus of chapter 5 is the semantic and syntactic characteristics of phrasal verbs. For the semantic classification into the groups introduced in chapter 3, the 2,910 phrasal verbs with the most common particle up (= 22 per cent of all) have been chosen as representative for the whole class. Given the huge amount of data, this is definitely a defensible decision, but in order to avoid possible skewing through potential idiosyncratic behaviour of one particle, a combination of two less frequent particles might also have been an option. With close to 60 per cent of all up-combinations emphatic (29.5 per cent) and idiomatic (27 per cent) types dominate, while metaphorical (2.6 per cent) and reiterative (2.7 per cent) types are rare; literal (24 per cent) and aktionsart (25.5 per cent) cases form the middle group. Diachronically, aktionsart, literal, idiomatic and especially emphatic types show an increase. Further semantic and lexical changes are revealed by comparing the first and last ARCHER periods (1650–99 versus 1950–90), with both substantial losses and gains of individual forms as well as of senses of persisting forms. Regarding syntactic aspects, more intransitive (52 per cent) than transitive (47 per cent) phrasal verbs are found. For the latter, the positions of verb (V), particle (P), object (O) and other elements (X) are investigated, with the results that the orders V(X)O(X)(X)P and V(X)P(X)(X)O make up 35 and 36 per cent respectively. With VOP having 70 per cent pronominal objects, VPO 99 per cent nominal and clausal objects and X being overwhelmingly restricted to one intervening constituent, the syntactic behaviour is largely in line with the grammatical status in PDE. An interesting fact is the fairly high number of passives of phrasal verbs (a quarter of all transitives), which occur in almost equally high numbers in science, journals and trial proceedings. The syntactic investigation is rounded off by dealing with nouns and adjectives derived from phrasal verbs by -ing and -er suffixation or by conversion. While -ing forms are most frequent in the late seventeenth century, the other types increase from 1800 onwards.
There are some very few points where the analysis and the examples given are not entirely convincing. The examples fit about and wait over given on p. 160, for example, are hard to make sense of; this might have been easily remedied by providing more context or some paraphrasing. Some other examples, specifically break together and observe down on p. 174, however, seem not to be unambiguously phrasal verbs, e.g. in ‘I believe we may get our Bones broke together’ together may be referring to the earlier we. There are also some examples that could be classified as phrasal-prepositional verbs, e.g. fit in (with), p. 160, and come up (with), p. 184, which are indeed seen as a separate category in this study (see p. 46).
The distribution of phrasal verbs across genres, treated in chapter 6, is highly relevant against the background of the debate about their supposed informality. Both Thim's (Reference Thim, Johnston, Mengden and Thim2006) claim that phrasal verbs in the past were stylistically neutral and rather dependent on other aspects like text topic and claims of their being colloquial in PDE are followed up by overall frequency comparisons and in-depth discussions of the individual corpus genres. Comparing genres as such across the whole period, phrasal verbs are most common by far in trial proceedings, and also somewhat more frequent in journals, diaries and fiction. The lowest frequencies are found in news, medicine and science, while letters and sermons cover a middle ground. Sermons and trial proceedings are shown to be characterized by uniform usage, whereas medicine, letters and drama exhibit more internal variation. Comparing genres within and across the corpus subperiods yields a more diverse picture at first sight. The tendencies that emerge in Rodríguez-Puente's thorough analysis point to an existing and increasing association of phrasal verbs with the spoken language and more informal styles from at least the eighteenth century onwards. Speech-related texts like diaries, drama, letters and sermons thus show an increase of phrasal verbs, of which the first three types also belong to the more informal end of the stylistic spectrum. Writing-based and writing-purposed texts fall into two groups, namely an expository/specialist and also formal group containing medicine and science, which shows decrease, and a more popular one, made up of fiction and news, which is characterized by increasing usage. While the former textual group shows decolloquialization over time, the latter group undergoes the opposite process. The fact that trial proceedings also show a decline of phrasal verbs is explained by the increasingly formal and formalized nature of the genre and by increasing professionalization, which removes the spontaneity that had characterized earlier courtroom interactions. The degree of formality is therefore proven to be a major factor. In addition to these overarching tendencies the discussion of individual genres and texts highlights the fact that the stylistic preferences and the idiolect of the writer, their sociocultural background as well as the subject matter of the text and its (changing) genre conventions also play an important role in the use or avoidance of phrasal verbs, thus at least partly corroborating Thim's (Reference Thim, Johnston, Mengden and Thim2006, Reference Thim2012) view.
It is this wide-ranging genre investigation with its substantial, but still carefully balanced case for the link between phrasal verbs and informality that make this study extremely valuable. In spite of the criticism voiced above, it is also the thorough semantic analysis of both particles on their own and of combinations as a whole, which yielded novel insights and suggestions, that make the book a very welcome addition to the research on phrasal verbs.
