Stefan Thim, 2012. Phrasal Verbs: The English Verb-Particle Construction and its History (Topics in English Linguistics 78). Berlin and New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Pp. xiv + 302. ISBN 978-3-11- 025702-1.
Résumé
‘How ‘English’ are the phrasal verbs really?’ and how did this highly familiar but often ill-described
construction evolve ‘from its early history up to the present’? (p. 1). Thim’s book, which may be
considered less as an ambitious empirical investigation of the topic than as a competent critical survey
of its literature, aims at answering these two questions. That these questions are intertwined is clear
from the answers they receive in this work.
First, the phrasal verb is not very special to English. While the term phrasal verb ‘is rarely
ever used except with respect to English’ (p. 2), Thim points out, as many scholars have done before
him, that there are close parallels to be found in other languages, most notably in the other present-day
Germanic languages. For instance, the German prefix verb aufgeben ‘give up’ may occur as two
separate words, with the prefix auf (a cognate of up) even obligatorily split from the verb by a Direct
Object noun phrase (e.g. Sie gab ihre Arbeit auf ‘She gave up her job’). Thim further cites examples of
particle verbs from Danish, Dutch, Norwegian Nynorsk and Swedish, as well as from Afrikaans,
Faroese, Icelandic and Yiddish, to support the claim that the English verb-particle construction is
certainly not an isolated language-specific phenomenon.
Second, these close parallels then help Thim answer the question about the evolution of the
‘English’ phrasal verb, whose origin can be traced back at least to Proto-Germanic. In Indo-European
languages more generally, Thim reminds us, prefix verbs and particle verbs have developed out of
adverb-verb sequences. And in fact, in various languages belonging to genetically more distant
families, particle-like verb prefixes, or ‘preverbs’, have formed out of adverbs, typically derived
themselves from previously independent relational nouns. English may look special in that particles
now standardly follow the verb, leaving aside exceptional structures of the type In came a strange
figure (more on which below). However, in Old English, and still in early Middle English, particles
could appear in both preverbal and postverbal position, depending to some extent on clause type
(subordinate or main) and finiteness, rather like the separable prefixes we encounter in Continental
West-Germanic languages such as present-day Dutch or German.
Thim strongly rejects the widespread misconception ‘that there must have been a ‘rise’ of the
phrasal verb’ (p. 145), that is, that the phrasal verb was a Middle English or later innovation which
superseded an earlier pattern, one with inseparable prefixes. Rather, Thim argues, the apparent
emergence of postverbal particles in English is nothing but an epiphenomenon of independent, wellestablished
changes in the language system, the most important of which is the long-term shift from
basic O(bject)V(erb) order in Proto-Germanic to VO order in Modern English. In Old English, the
oldest order, Object – particle – Verb, was typically found in subordinate clauses and occasionally still
in main clauses. When the verb started to occupy the second position in clauses (‘V2 movement’),
unstressed preverbs that had fused with the verb stem moved along with it as inseparable prefixes. By
contrast, preverbs carrying stress (‘particles’) remained independent and stayed behind in final
position when the verb itself moved leftward. It was first the finite verb (v) which moved (O prt V v →
v O prt V), causing a clausal brace with the non-finite main verb (v … V), but the latter subsequently
rejoined the finite verb in a process known as exbraciation (v O prt V → v V O prt). Extraposition of
especially heavy objects may have played a role in dissolving the brace and further yielded the
alternative structure with the particle immediately following the verb (v V prt O).
Domaines
Linguistique
Origine : Fichiers produits par l'(les) auteur(s)
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