Phrasal Verbs: The English Verb-Particle Construction and Its History

Stefan Thim follows the history of the English verb-particle construction, commonly called the phrasal verb, from its Indo-European and Germanic beginnings to the present. The book builds a comparison across present-day Germanic languages to show how such constructions behave in each.

Looking at their basic semantic and syntactic features, the study concludes that English phrasal verbs are not structurally odd. It proposes treating them as a kind of periphrastic word-building, which gives a new way of seeing where they belong in the grammar.

This edition is published by de Gruyter Mouton under ISBN-13 9783110257021.