English Verb-Particle Constructions: A Gradient Analysis

This study clearly defines the English verb-particle combinations dealing with some of the linguistic properties of both the prepositional and phrasal verbs. Various researchers have argued that phrasal verbs are semantically gradient although they approve three distinctive categories such as literal, aspectual, and idiomatic as Fukui (2006) suggests. It is proposed that prepositional verbs are semantically in the same scale-class as idiomatic phrasal verbs although they are syntactically different in many ways. In the course of discussion, the appropriateness of the syntactic and semantic gradience of these kinds of constructions are analyzed by using a corpus. And it is also revealed in this study that the borderline between them (e.g. adverbial vs. prepositional, aspectual vs. nonaspectual, literal vs. figurative) is not always clear and that we need to examine them carefully using the cognitive approaches combined with corpus research or other methods. As a result, it is suggested that this gradient analysis is applicable even to the meaning of the words by expanding their metaphorical connotations from concrete to abstract or idiomatic. Finally, the author points out the importance of elicitation test techniques for Japanese EFL learners