English grammar - Roger Berry 2012

B7.1 Multi-word and single-word verbs
B7 Multi-word verbs
Section B Development

In A7 we looked at ways of varying the verb phrase by adding words such as do and not. But there is another way in which verb phrases can be extended. Many verbs in English get their meaning not only from the verb itself but also from a ’little word’ that follows. These combinations of ’little word’ plus verb are the topic of this section.

Terminology

Some teachers and grammars use ’phrasal verb’ as a cover term for all these combinations. In this book, however, ’multi-word verb’ is used as the cover term, and ’phrasal verb’ is used for just one type, while ’prepositional verb’ and ’phrasal-prepositional verb’ are two other types. You will see that they are actually quite different.

B7.1 Multi-word and single-word verbs

First of all we need to distinguish multi-words verbs from single-word verbs that are simply followed by a prepositional phrase. An example of the latter would be:

I looked up the chimney

Here we have a single-word verb, look, and what follows is a prepositional phrase: up the chimney. We can tell this by asking a wh- interrogative (see A8) and looking at the answer:

Where did you look? Up the chimney.

Here look and up have their usual meanings.

Compare this with an example with a multi-word (phrasal) verb:

I looked up the word

where the corresponding question and answer would be

What did you look up? The word

and not

Where did you look? Up the word.

Clearly we have very different grammar at work here. There is also issue of meaning; the meaning of look up cannot be guessed from its constituent words. It does not mean to ’look in an upward direction’; it means to ’check something’.