I’ve been doing a lot of thinking and researching about phrasal verbs recently. I spent a few hours this morning going through some of the more recent papers and books (that I could access, grr) to refresh my understanding of the current description and classification of phrasal verbs and how they fit into the broader category of multi-word verbs. MWVs, have, since I last read about them, evolved a bit with the category generally breaking down into 4 sub-categories. In true linguistic research fashion, these categories are not agreed on so much as they are acceded to because no one has anything better: phrasal verbs, prepositional verbs, phrasal-prepositional verbs, and…everything else.

While reading, I also came across the concept of Light Verbs as part of phrasal verb constructions. Light verbs are what used to be called semantically weak verbs (among other terms). But, yeah, light verb construct sounds a bit nicer, so, sure. We’ll use that. And while they are not a class of MWVs, they often show up as idioms - MWVs that use have, take, get, and the like can be both MWVs and LVCs at the same time. Depending on the usage. So, as always with English, this classification is air-tight and leak-proof so long as you don’t get it wet.

Anyway, I’m not entirely sure what I’m going to do with all this new data, much less the old data, but at least I’ll have something new to bore people with at cocktail parties.

Image sourced from the Public Domain Image Archive / Library of Congress

File under: Research Questions