Journal of Linguistics

Table of Contents - 1989 - Volume 25, Issue 02  

Articles

Verb-preposition constructions and small clauses in English1

Bas Aartsa1

a1 English Department, University College London

The analysis of verb-particle constructions, or verb-preposition constructions, as I will call them, has-given rise to much debate in the linguistic literature over a long period of time. Traditionally, a bipartite classification of these structures has been assumed consisting of a class of ‘phrasal verbs’, such as those in (1) and (2), and a class of ‘prepositional verbs’, such as those in (3):

(1) I switched the light off.

(2) I looked the information up.

(3) Look at the prospectus: it clearly states that your admission depends on your examination results.

(Received October 28 1988)

(Revised February 14 1989)

Footnotes

1 An earlier version of this paper was presented at the 1988 Autumn Meeting of the Linguistics Association of Great Britain in Exeter. I would like to thank Flor Aarts, Bob Borsley, Peter Coopmans, Sidney Greenbaum, Teun Hoekstra, Ewa Jaworska, Andrew Radford, And Rosta, Joe Taglicht, Nigel Vincent and two anonymous JL referees for valuable comments.