GLIMPSES OF THE ENGLISH VERB GROUP = iota SY Lector drd. GINA MACIUCA Catedra de Limbi Germanice Facultatea de Litere Universitatea “Stefan cel Mare” Suceava * , doe Iea Une on Ti Botan cot tao BUCEAVA NALIOTEGA Va fede ZR TSS an © sree Sco cor ENTS. Chapter I: Bird’s-Eye View Chapter I © F Chapter 111:CAUSATION makes the world ‘TICK...and our head SPIN : MULTI-WORD VERBS =a Close-Up Chapter IV.1. Defining the Concept V.1.1, Terminology Employed IV.1.2. The Semantic View - L.P. Smith 1V.1.3. The Lexical Criterion - W. P Jowett IV.1.4, The Syntactic Criterion T. F, Mitchell 1V.2, Modern Views: B. Fraser 1V.2.1, Subcategorization Features, IV.2.2. Verb-Particle Relationships 1V.2.3, Properties of Verbs Which Combine With Particles 1V.2.4. The Constraints on Particle Position — ps p.20 p27 p.40 p40 p43 pas p.a7 p. 50 v.53 p53 p58 p. 62 p. 651V.24. Cases of "Derived Verb- - (© Particle Combinations 1V.2.6. Particle Modification IV.2.7.The Relation of Particles to Prefixes 1V.3. Modern Views: D. Bolinger 1V.3.1, Discriminating Tests IV.3.2. Tracing Back Phrasal Verbs to ‘Their Underlying Structure Types 1V.3.3. Fraser’s Type (b} Derived Verb-Particle Combinations IV.34, The Role of Lexical Adjectives in Phrasal Verbs 1V.3.5. The Role of Infinitives in } Phrasal Verbs 1V.3.6. ‘Existential Phrasal Verbs? 1V.3.7. Concluding Remarks on ‘Particles Other Than Adverbs’ IV.38. The Semantic Features of Particles 1V.3.9. The Level of *Stereotyping’ in p.69 pT p.73 p. 80 p. 80 p.98 p.99 p. 100 p. 102 LW Phrasal Verbs IV.10, “Extended Stereotypes” 1V.4, Deverbal Nouns - A Contribution IV.8, Subcategorization of Malti -Word Verbs IV.S.1. Degrees of Idiomaticity IV.5.2, Prepositional Verbs versus Phrasal Verbs 1V.5.2.1. Type I Prepositional Verbs ‘Type II Prepositional Verbs LV,5.2.3, Phrasal-Prepositional Verbs 1V.5.2.4, Verbs with Two Prepositions Y Minor Verb Combinations 1V.5.4, Function Verb Phrases IV.5.5. Compact Idioms 1V.5.6.$ ting the Trend or S Against the Stream? NOTES BIBLIOGRAPHY P. Pp 107 10 12 139 143 148.CHAPTER TL BIRD'S—EYE VIEW "it was in 1939..that 1 came to see how unaccountable the English verb must seem to speakers of more ordinary European languages like German and Czech...All languages are equally hard, and equally easy, taken as wholes; but cach has its greatest difficulties located in its own place, German, for instance, is especially difficult in its nouns, where English is easy. Native children lear substantially all there is to learn about English verbs before first going to school; fortunately, we say, but then that is only what we must expect, for the complete grammar of any language is all within the capacities of an 8-year-old child, and the most important (the hardest) parts of it are learned in tie middle of that range of years. That is what makes technical description of the hardest part so difficult to write...Our children leam to tie shoe~ aces (with a bow-knot!) before they start school; fortunately, we say, but then that is only what we must expect, for the complete system of all the knots that sailors used to tic is all within the capacities of an 8-year-old child, and the hardest of them were learned in the middle of that sailor's apprenticeship. ust sit down and try to write a usable description of how bow-knots are tied, and you will see exactly what I mean {1 A person who has leamed how to deseribe a language by itself is a professional linguist. He is comparable to a person who has leamed how to write technical descriptions of all those sailor's knots, and to do it from watching the sailor without listening to him. It took me a quarter of a century to do it for the English verb; for professional linguists T could have put it all into cone type -written page” (Martin Joos, The English Verb, 1964) What Martin Joos really means here is the difficulties one has to grapple with when theorising on matters which seldom go beyond the empirical grasp of an 8-year-old child's mind, especially where linguisties is eoncemed. ‘This preliminary chapter is a rather loose collection of, background pieces intended to set the stage for the rest 10 come. The first glimpse we shall get is of Trask’s verb definition ‘on page 297 of his "A Dictionary of Grammatical Terms in_Linguisties" (London, 1993); "(V)\One of the most important lexical categories, and one which is seemin universal .The class of verbs in every language is both large and open. Grammatically speaking, verbs are most ‘obviously distinguished by the fact that each verb ly requires the presence in its sentence of a specified set of Noun Phrase arguments. each of which typically represents some particular semantic role and ach of which may be required to appear in some articular grammatical form (particular case marking, particular preposition, etc.). In a very high proportion of aes, though not in all, verbs serve as the locus of se, and often also for aspect, mood and ber with subjects and Sometimes other argument Noun Phrases, Semantically, most typically express actions, events and states of aflairs: eat, die, know, collapse") ‘What about the term Verb Group? Why the sudden change of heart? What is wrong with good old “Verb Phrase’? ‘As PH. Matthews aptly puts it on page 160 of his Syntax: "Present usage [of the term *phrase’] is confused, and any definition would do violence to some tsrammarian’s practice”. In Quirk et als view, for instance, Verb Phrases are one word or a ‘head verb” plus auxiliaries (p43 £).What, then, isa head? It is usually considered to be that element ‘a constituent syntactically central in that it is primarily responsible for the syntactic character of the constituent More orthodox grammarians recognized a rather inexplicit and limited notion of heads which was developed by the American structuralists and extended to most constituents, subsequently abandoned by early mnerative grammar, only to be ‘overhauled’ andacclaimed by same as a key-word of syntax. There remains, however, considerable disagreement as to which ‘categories are heads." It is generally assumed that a eatepory has only one head, but coordinate structures are ‘often analysed as containing as many heads as they have conjunets,} Returning now to our previous issue, it really grieves us to say that for many linguists a phrase is merely a combination of words that is not a clause and, what is even worse, for some of them at least, a noun clause is also a noun phrase, simply because itis a syntagm which fills a noun-like role. (s. phrase structure grammar). ‘The confusion we can easily trace back to the trivalent definition of the “phrase”. Firstly, it ean be viewed as a synonym for ‘constituent’. In this sense, any constituent, even a clause, may be regarded as a phrase."Secondly, it may be considered a synonym for “maximal projection’, particularly in such category labels as noun phrase, verb phrase, prepositional phrase, etc. In this sense—which is also the one we shall be employing in our course—the term ‘phrase” contrasts with ‘clause™The third use is the traditional label applied very loosely to any string of words which someone wants to consider, regardless of its syntactic status. In this sense, phrase may be regarded as the syntactic equivalent of the morphological term Smorph’, though linguists nowadays seem to prefer the altemative term “sequence” As for the term VERB PHRASE, this is in tum ambivalent. In traditional linguistic parlance it used to be the label for a sequence of auxiliary and main verbs, such fas must have been laughing in They must_have_been laughing on the other side of their face, Unfortunately, no contemporary theory of grammar recognizes such a sequence as making up a constituent any more In its other sense, a ‘verb phrase’ is the syntactic category consisting of a verb and its complements and also, in most analyses, its adjunets. Virtually all analyses ‘agree that, in a simple example such as Lmet_him_in London, the sequence met_him_in_London_is a verb phrase. There is less agreement, however, about ‘constructions involving verb- complement verb phrases. While met him is regarded by all as a verb phrase, the longer sequence have met him is treated differently in different frameworks. Many approaches, including Generalized Phrase Structure Grammar, view this as a larger verb phrase with the structure [yVVP] Transformational Grammar and the earlier versions of Government-Binding Theory, however, did not even constituent, preferring instead to analyse the whole sentence as having the structure (NPAUXVP), with the auxiliary have located under the AUX node. Recent versions of Government-Binding Theory, in contrast, treat have met him as a constituent , ‘but not as a verb phrase, There is also considerable controversy as to whether the category verb phrase is sn coigtare suceava_ Oi 952