Transitive phrasal verbs in acquisition and use: A view from construction grammar

Abstract

Author/s Beate Hampe Erfurt University, Germany ABSTRACT This paper surveys a number of aspects involved in viewing transitive phrasal verbs as verb-particle constructions in the construction-grammar sense of the term. The two word-order templates Verb-Object-Particle and Verb-Particle-Object, as fully schematic and semantically and pragmatically distinct constructions (Gries 2003), are discussed as members of different construction networks, viz. transitive vs. caused-motion constructions, with a focus on the latter. Moreover, the word-order constructions are distinguished from specific phrasal verbs as “formal idioms”. It is argued that the notion of “allostruction” (Cappelle 2006) can be fruitfully applied only at the intermediate level of the latter. The first results of a corpus study using data from CHILDES (parts of Manchester, Fletcher), the ICE-GB and parts of the BNC are reported to support the claim that early instances of transitive phrasal verbs exhibiting the word-order Verb-Object-Particle function as precursors (Diessel 2004) to full-blown, lexically and syntactically more complex realisations of the caused-motion construction. In a more explorative and thus also preliminary way, three hierarchical configurational frequency analyses are employed to trace the constellations of selected features of transitive phrasal verbs across different age groups.

Keywords

• verb-particle construction
• particle placement
• caused-motion construction
• allostruction
• precursor construction
• hierarchical configurational frequency analysis