Anglopolis: Who's Afraid of Phrasal Verbs?

Surely the best way to overcome the fear of phrasal verbs – also known as ‘multi-word verbs’— is to get to know exactly what they are, and this is pretty easy: phrasal verbs are verbs made up of a verb plus a particle (or sometimes two particles.) 

VERBS IN CONTEXT

For example: “I ran out of milk” is a phrasal verb. The complete unit ‘run+out+of’ has a specific meaning: something is completely finished. In this case it is different from the original verb ‘run’.

So far so good, right? Well… no. Let’s see this other example: “I ran out of the house”. Here, the unit ‘run+out+of’ is not a phrasal verb, it’s just a verb plus a preposition. I ran (where to) out of the house. See the difference?

How did this start?

In Old English there were quite a lot of verbs that went with a particle. But back then the particle was usually stuck on the front of the verb and didn’t come off. Take the very familiar word ‘understand’. This comes from the Old English ‘understanden’ (literally to ‘stand under’). In this case, the verb ‘stand’ and the particle ‘under’ never separated.

But thanks to influence from Old Norse and French, by the period of Middle English (1150 to 1500 approximately), the word order in English sentences was changing and some of these compound verbs did begin to come apart. Lots of new phrasal verbs came into colloquial use in this period, especially in the theatre.

Shakespeare is guilty

It’s not surprising that Shakespeare, that master of colloquial speech, used plenty of phrasal verbs in his plays and probably helped them take off. Now you know who’s to blame!

YOU ARE NOT ALONE

So if phrasal verbs fill you with horror, all we can do is apologise and assure you that they have been getting learners of English down for centuries. In the preface to the first English dictionary, published in 1755, Samuel Johnson writes: “There is another kind of composition more frequent in our language than perhaps in any other, from which arises to foreigners the greatest difficulty. We modify the signification of many verbs by a particle subjoined.” You are not alone.

But how do I learn them?

That, of course, is the $64,000 question. There are plenty of phrasal verb dictionaries on the market and recently some good websites you can sign up to and even apps that send exercises to your phone. But in my experience, the students that get phrasal verbs the quickest do it from real life. So if you see a phrasal verb you like when you’re reading this magazine or watching a film in English, write it down and try to use it yourself as soon as you can.

Turning phrasal verbs into nouns

When we form a noun from a phrasal verb (and there are lots of examples of this), there’s a noticeable change in their pronunciation: the stress moves from the particle to the verb.

For example: 
“The police are cracking DOWN on drug dealers.” (phrasal verb)
“There has been a police CRACKdown on drug dealers.” (noun)

“The pressure builds UP.” (phrasal verb)
“There is a BUILD-up of pressure.” (noun)

Sometimes the noun form is hyphenated and sometimes it isn’t. 
English is flexible that way!