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- Title
'THESE I HAD NEVER BEFORE OBSERVED DOWN'. A CORPUS-BASED STUDY OF PHRASAL VERBS IN LATE MODERN ENGLISH.
- Authors
RODRÍGUEZ-PUENTE, PAULA
- Abstract
This paper investigates the status of phrasal verbs and their development during the Late Modern English period (1700-1900). For this purpose, the occurrences of a number of combinations of verb plus adverbial particle have been traced in the British section of ARCHER 3.1, a multi-genre historical corpus covering the years 1650 to 1999. Findings indicate that Late Modern English phrasal verbs are quite similar to their Present-day English counterparts, except for the abundance of Latinate polysyllabic verbs used as the verbal base of the compound, as well as for the attestation of certain syntactic patterns which seem out of place from a Presentday English perspective. Moreover, although it is generally assumed that these constructions tend to become more frequent in the language over time, especially in oral, colloquial registers, evidence shows that the growth of phrasal verbs is not continuous. Rather a decrease in the frequency of verb-adverb combinations can be observed between the second half of the 18th century and the first half of the 19th, probably due to the influence of the prescriptivist strictures of the time, which generally encouraged the avoidance of phrasal verbs. As regards distribution across genres, during the Late Modern English period they show a clear tendency to appear more frequently in those text types closer to colloquial, informal language. Nevertheless, the present analysis shows that the inclusion or non-inclusion of phrasal verbs in a text may also be related to the content of the text, as well as to the particular idiolect of the producer of the text.
- Subjects
PHRASE structure grammar; VERBS; ADVERBS (Grammar); ATTEST function (Auditing); ENGLISH language conversation &; phrase books
- Publication
Neuphilologische Mitteilungen, 2012, Issue 4, p433
- ISSN
0028-3754
- Publication type
Article