Die Hausarbeit beschäftigt sich mit der Frage, weshalb dazu geraten wird in formellen Texten Wörter lateinischen Ursprungs anstelle von Phrasal verbs zu verwenden. Anhand der Geschichte des Phrasal verbs wird erklärt, wie es zu seiner schlechten Konnotation kam.
Table of Contents
1 Introduction
2 Research Method and Results
3 The Origin of the Phrasal Verb
4 Influence of Latinization on the Use of Phrasal verbs
5 Conclusion
Bibliography
1 Introduction
"The most valuable of all talents is that of never using two words when one will do" - 3rd President of the United States Thomas Jefferson ("How to Avoid Phrasal Verbs in Academic Writing", 2018)
In the 1960s, a consumer advocacy group started a movement which demanded the simplification of public documents (Dorney 1988: 49). This should be achieved by the usage of comprehensible language for example through the substitution of Latin simple verbs with the easier Anglo-Saxon phrasal verb. However, when we examine modern public texts, we will assert the number of simple verbs is usually proportionally higher than the number of phrasal verbs.
A phrasal verb is a linguistic compound that consists of a verb that is followed by a freely moveable adverbial particle (Thim 2012:4). They are mostly based on a monosyllabic Germanic root and express motion, rest, affect, giving and making like in the following examples from the BNC: go on,carry out,set up (Thim 2012:40).
One possible explanation for the small number of phrasal verbs in public writing, is that many linguists and language instructors discourage their students to use phrasal verbs in academic texts because they are considered informal. We are told to use their Latin-rooted simple verb synonym instead. ("How to Avoid Phrasal Verbs in Academic Writing", 2018).
I argue that the preference for simple verbs over phrasal verbs is actually just a preference for Latinate words over Germanic words. To outline the development of the phrasal verb's bad connotation, this paper will start off by taking a look at the origin of the phrasal verb which is located in the period of Old English. Afterwards I will examine how the word order of this syntactic construction has changed in the Middle English period. Finally, this paper focuses on how the phrasal verb was evaluated as colloquial in the end of the Early Modern period and examines several theories that might give an explanation for this development.
2 Research Method and Results
In order to prove that today phrasal verbs do occur less in formal texts than they do in colloquial language, I collocated a list of phrasal verbs and simple verbs from three different corpuses. Subsequently, I compared the numbers of frequency in all three text types in form of a bar chart. The diagram shows the proportion of phrasal verbs in comparison to the number of simple verbs in the whole BNC corpus, BNC Law, Politics and Education and BNC Spoken, unscripted speech. It can be observed that the number of phrasal verbs in proportion to the number of simple verbs is significantly low in all three corpuses. Nevertheless, the BNC Law, Politics and Education corpus contains only 2.75% phrasal verbs, whereas BNC Unscripted Spoken Language contains 5.8% phrasal verbs and the Complete BNC includes 5.2% of phrasal verbs. Hence, BNC Law, Politics and Education has the lowest percentage of phrasal verbs.
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- Citar trabajo
- Joelle Schmidt (Autor), 2021, The Rise of the Phrasal Verb, Múnich, GRIN Verlag, https://www.grin.com/document/1180221
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¡Carge sus propios textos! Gane dinero y un iPhone X.