The English Phrasal Verb, 1650–Present History, Stylistic Drifts, and Lexicalisation

Providing a detailed and comprehensive account of the development of phrasal verbs from early modern to present-day English, this study covers almost 400 years in the history of English, and provides both a diachronic and synchronic account based on over 12,000 examples extracted from stratified electronic corpora. The corpus analysis provides evidence of how registers can inform us about the history of English, as it traces and compares the usage and stylistic drifts of phrasal verbs across ten different genres - drama, fiction, journals, diaries, letters, medicine, news, science, sermons, and trial proceedings. The study also sheds new light on the morpho-syntactic and semantic features of phrasal verbs, proposing a new approach to the category, considering not only on their grammatical features, but also their historical development, by discussing the category in terms of a number of central mechanisms of language change.

1. Introduction; 2. Corpus and methodology; 3. Delimiting the scope of the study: what are phrasal verbs?; 4. The relationship between phrasal verbs and the processes of grammaticalisation, lexicalisation, and idiomatisation; 5. Phrasal verbs 1650–1990: Linguistic aspects; 6. Phrasal verbs 1650–1990: cross-genre distribution; 7. Conclusion.

Paula Rodríguez-Puente is Ph.D. Lecturer of English Language and Linguistics at the Universidad de Oviedo, Spain. She has published widely in international journals such as English Studies, English Language and Linguistics and Folia Linguistica Historica as well as contributed to prestigious edited volumes.