Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-p9bg8 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-29T05:00:45.542Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Tracking down phrasal verbs in the spoken language of the past: Late Modern English in focus1

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  25 May 2016

PAULA RODRÍGUEZ-PUENTE
PAULA RODRÍGUEZ-PUENTE*
Affiliation:
Department of English, French and German, University of Oviedo, Campus El Milán – C/Teniente Alfonso Martínez s/n, 33011 Oviedo, Spainrodriguezppaula@uniovi.es
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

This article analyses the formal and stylistic features of phrasal verbs in the Old Bailey Corpus and compares them with results obtained from the speech-related genres of ARCHER (A Representative Corpus of Historical English Registers), namely diaries, drama, letters and sermons. Phrasal verbs tend to be associated with spoken colloquial registers both in PDE and previous stages of the language, although this statement has been challenged by Thim (2006a, 2012), who argues that in EModE the (non-)occurrence of phrasal verbs in a particular text seems motivated by its contents, rather than its degree of formality. The results in this study show that phrasal verbs were a feature of the spoken language already in LModE, since their frequency is remarkably higher in trial proceedings, arguably the closest representation of the spoken word of the past. However, in contrast to other speech-related text types, the frequency of phrasal verbs in trial proceedings decreases over time, which seems to point towards a decolloquialisation of this genre over time. The study also shows differences at the formal level across genres, demonstrating that sermons display more formal and archaic characteristics, whereas trial proceedings contain features which bring them closer to the spoken language.

Type
Research Article
Information
English Language & Linguistics , Volume 21 , Issue 1 , March 2017 , pp. 69 - 97
Check for updates
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2016 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Footnotes

1

I would like to express my deepest gratitude to Professor Laurel Brinton and the two anonymous reviewers of this article for their kind comments, insightful suggestions and valuable discussion on earlier versions of this piece of research. For generous financial support, thanks are due to the European Regional Development Fund and the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness (grants FFI2014-52188-P and FFI2014-51873-REDT).

References

Akimoto, Minoji. 1999. Collocations and idioms in Late Modern English. In Brinton, Laurel J. & Akimoto, Minoji (eds.), Collocational and idiomatic aspects of composite predicates in the history of English, 207–38. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Akimoto, Minoji. 2006. On the decline of after and forth in verb phrases. In Dalton-Puffer, Christiane, Kastovsky, Dieter, Ritt, Nikolaus & Schendl, Herbert (eds.), Syntax, style and grammatical norms: English from 1500–2000, 11–31. Bern: Peter Lang.Google Scholar
Anderson, Howard & Ehrenpreis, Irvin. 1966. The familiar letter in the eighteenth century: Some generalizations. In Anderson, Howard, Daghlian, Philip B. & Ehrenpreis, Irvin (eds.), The familiar letter in the eighteenth century, 269–82. Lawrence: University of Kansas Press.Google Scholar
ARCHER 3.1: A Representative Corpus of Historical English Registers 3.1. 1990–1993/2002/2007/2010. Originally compiled under the supervision of Douglas Biber & Edward Finegan at Northern Arizona University and University of Southern California. Modified and expanded by subsequent members of a consortium of universities. Current member universities: Northern Arizona, Southern California, Freiburg, Heidelberg, Helsinki, Uppsala, Michigan, Manchester, Lancaster, Bamberg, Zurich, Trier, Salford, and Santiago de Compostela. www.alc.manchester.ac.uk/subjects/lel/research/projects/archer/ Google Scholar
Archer, Dawn. 2012. Data retrieval in diachronic context. The case of the historical English courtroom. In Nevalainen, Terttu & Traugott, Elizabeth C. (eds.), The Oxford handbook of the history of English, 145–54. Oxford: Oxford University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Baayen, Harald. 1989. A corpus-based approach to morphological productivity. Statistical analysis and psycho-linguistic interpretation. PhD dissertation, Free University of Amsterdam.Google Scholar
Baayen, Harald. 1992. Quantitative aspects of morphological productivity. In Booij, Gert & van Marle, Jaap (eds.), Yearbook of morphology 1991, 109–49. Dordrecht: Kluwer.Google Scholar
Biber, Douglas. 1989. A typology of English texts. Linguistics 27, 3–43.Google Scholar
Biber, Douglas & Finegan, Edward. 1989. Drift and the evolution of English style: A history of three genres. Language 65 (3), 487–517.Google Scholar
Biber, Douglas & Finegan, Edward. 1997. Diachronic relations among speech-based and written registers in English. In Nevalainen, Terttu & Kahlas-Tarkka, Leena (eds), To explain the present: Studies in the changing English language in honour of Matti Rissanen, 253–75. Helsinki: Société Néophilologique.Google Scholar
Biber, Douglas, Finegan, Edward, Atkinson, Dwight, Beck, Ann, Burges, Dennis & Burges, Jena. 1994. The design and analysis of the ARCHER corpus: A progress report. In Kytö, Merja, Rissanen, Matti & Wright, Susan (eds.), Corpora across the centuries: Proceedings of the First International Colloquium on English Diachronic Corpora, St Catharine's College Cambridge, 25–27 March 1993, 3–6. Amsterdam: Rodopi.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Biber, Douglas, Conrad, Susan & Reppen, Randy 1998. Corpus linguistics: Investigating language structure and use. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Biber, Douglas, Johansson, Stig, Leech, Geoffrey, Conrad, Susan & Finegan, Edward. 1999. Longman grammar of spoken and written English. London: Longman.Google Scholar
Bolinger, Dwight. 1971. The phrasal verb in English. Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Brinton, Laurel J. 1988. The development of English aspectual systems: Aspectualizers and post-verbal particles. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Brinton, Laurel J. 1996. Attitudes toward increasing segmentalization: Complex and phrasal verbs in English. Journal of English Linguistics 24, 186–205.Google Scholar
Brinton, Laurel J. & Traugott, Elizabeth C.. 2005. Lexicalization and language change. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Brown, David West & Palmer, Chris C.. 2015. The phrasal verb in American English: Using corpora to track down historical trends in particle distribution, register variation, and noun collocations. In Adams, Michael, Brinton, Laurel J. & Fulk, R. D. (eds.), Studies in the history of the English language VI: Evidence and method in histories of English, 71–97. Berlin and New York: Mouton de Gruyter.Google Scholar
Claridge, Claudia. 2000. Multi-word verbs in Early Modern English: A corpus-based study. Amsterdam: Rodopi.Google Scholar
Claridge, Claudia & Wilson, Andrew. 2002. Style evolution in the English sermon. In Fanego, Teresa, Méndez-Naya, Belén & Seoane, Elena (eds.), Sounds, words, texts and change. Selected papers from 11 ICEHL, Santiago de Compostela, 7–11 September 2000, 25–44. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins.Google Scholar
A Corpus of English Dialogues 1560–1760 . 2006. Compiled under the supervision of Merja Kytö (Uppsala University) and Jonathan Culpeper (Lancaster University).Google Scholar
Cowie, Anthony P. & Mackin, Ronald. 1975. Oxford dictionary of current idiomatic English, vol. I: Verbs with prepositions and particles. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Culpeper, Jonathan & Kytö, Merja. 2000. Data in historical pragmatics: Spoken interaction (re)cast as writing. Journal of Historical Pragmatics 1 (2), 175–99.Google Scholar
Culpeper, Jonathan & Kytö, Merja. 2010. Early Modern English dialogues: Spoken interaction as writing. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Cusack, Bridget. 1998. Everyday English 1500–1700: A reader. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.Google Scholar
Davies, Mark. 2004–. BYU-BNC. (Based on the British National Corpus from Oxford University Press). Available online at http://corpus.byu.edu/bnc/ Google Scholar
Davies, Mark. 2010–. The Corpus of Historical American English: 400 million words, 1810-2009. http://corpus.byu.edu/coha/ Google Scholar
Denison, David. 1981. Aspects of the history of English group-verbs, with particular attention to the syntax of the Ormulum. PhD dissertation, Oxford University.Google Scholar
Denison, David. 1985. The origins of completive up in English. Neuphilologische Mitteilungen 86 (1), 37–61.Google Scholar
Denison, David. 1998. Syntax. In Romaine, Suzanne (ed.), The Cambridge history of the English language, vol. IV: 1776–1997, 92–329. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Denison, David. 2007. Syntactic surprises in some English letters: The underlying progress of the language. In Elspaß, Stephan, Langer, Nils, Scharloth, Joachim & Vanderbussche, Wim (eds.), Germanic language histories ‘from below’ (1700–2000), 115–27. Berlin and New York: Walter de Gruyter.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Diemer, Stefan. 2014. Closing the gap: The development of verb–particle combinations in English between 1810 and 1960. In Iyeiri, Yoko & Smith, Jennifer (eds.), Studies in Middle and Modern English: Historical change, 41–57. Osaka: Osaka Books.Google Scholar
Emsley, Clive, Hitchcock, Tim & Shoemaker, Robert. 2015. Trial procedures. The Old Bailey proceedings online, 1674 to 1913. www.oldbaileyonline.org/static/Trial-procedures.jsp.Google Scholar
Fraser, Bruce. 1976. The verb–particle combination in English. New York: Academic Press.Google Scholar
Görlach, Manfred. 2001. Eighteenth-century English. Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag C. Winter.Google Scholar
Grund, Peter. 2007. From tongue to text: The transmission of the Salem witchcraft examination records. American Speech 82 (2), 119–50.Google Scholar
Heaton, John B. 1965. Prepositions and adverbial particles. London: Longman.Google Scholar
Hiltunen, Risto. 1983. The decline of the prefixes and the beginnings of the English phrasal verb. Turku: Turun Yliopisto.Google Scholar
Hiltunen, Risto. 1994. Phrasal verbs in Early Modern English: Notes on lexis and style. In Kastovsky, Dieter (ed.), Studies in Early Modern English, 129–40. Berlin and New York: Mouton de Gruyter.Google Scholar
Huber, Magnus. 2007. The Old Bailey proceedings, 1764–1834. Evaluating and annotating a corpus of 18th- and 19th-century spoken English. In Meurman-Solin, Anneli & Nurmi, Arja (eds.), Annotating variation and change (Studies in Variation, Contacts and Change in English 1). Helsinki: University of Helsinki. www.helsinki.fi/varieng/series/volumes/01/huber/ Google Scholar
Huber, Magnus, Nissel, Magnus, Maiwald, Patrick & Widlitzki, Bianca. 2012. The Old Bailey Corpus: Spoken English in the 18th and 19th centuries. www.uni-giessen.de/oldbaileycorpus Google Scholar
Huddleston, Rodney & Pullum, Geoffrey K.. 2002. The Cambridge grammar of the English language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Hundt, Marianne & Mair, Christian. 1999. ‘Agile’ and ‘uptight’ genres: The corpus-based approach to language change in progress. International Journal of Corpus Linguistics 4 (2), 221–42.Google Scholar
ICE-GB: International Corpus of English, British component. Version 1, 1998. Compiled at the Survey of English Usage. www.ucl.ac.uk/english-usage/projects/ice-gb/ Google Scholar
Ishizaki, Yasuaki. 2009. A usage-based analysis of the distribution of forth in the history of English. Kindai Eigo Kenkyu (Studies in Modern English 25), 41–61.Google Scholar
Ishizaki, Yasuaki. 2012. A usage-based analysis of the phrasal verbs in Early and Late Modern English. English Language and Linguistics 16 (2), 241–60.Google Scholar
Konishi, Tomoshichi. 1958. The growth of the verb-adverb combination in English: A brief sketch. In Araki, Kazuo (ed.), Studies in English grammar and linguistics: A miscellany in honour of Takanobu Otsuka, 117–28. Tokyo: Kenkyusha.Google Scholar
Kytö, Merja & Walker, Terry. 2003. The linguistic study of Early Modern English speech-related texts: How ‘bad’ can ‘bad’ data be? Journal of English Linguistics 31, 221–48.Google Scholar
Kytö, Merja & Walker, Terry. 2006. Guide to A Corpus of English Dialogues 1560–1760. Uppsala: Acta Universitatis Upsaliensis.Google Scholar
Kytö, Merja & Smitterberg, Erik. 2006. Nineteenth-century English: An age of stability or a period of change? In Facchinetti, Roberta & Rissanen, Matti (eds.), Corpus-based studies of diachronic English, 199–230. Bern: Peter Lang.Google Scholar
Liu, Dilin. 2011. The most frequently used English phrasal verbs in American English: A corpus-based analysis. TESOL Quarterly 45 (4), 661–88.Google Scholar
Live, Anna H. 1965. The discontinuous verb in English. Word 21 (3), 428–51.Google Scholar
Mair, Christian. 1997. Parallel corpora: A real-time approach to the study of language change in progress. In Ljung, Magnus (ed.), Corpus-based studies in English: Papers from the Seventeenth International Conference on English Language and Research on Computerized Corpora (ICAME 17), 195–209. Amsterdam: Rodopi.Google Scholar
Makkai, Adam. 1972. Idiom structure in English. The Hague: Mouton.Google Scholar
Martin, Pamela. 1990. The phrasal verb: Diachronic development in British and American English. PhD dissertation, Columbia University Teachers College (USA).Google Scholar
McArthur, Tom. 1989. The long-neglected phrasal verb. English Today 18, 38–44.Google Scholar
Mitchell, Terence F. 1958. Syntagmatic relations in linguistic analysis. Transactions of the Philological Society, 101–18.Google Scholar
Nevalainen, Terttu. 1999. Early Modern English lexis and semantics. In Lass, Roger (ed.), The Cambridge history of the English language, vol. III: 1476-1776, 332–458. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Nevalainen, Terttu. 2001. Continental conventions in Early English correspondence. In Diller, Hans-Jürgen & Görlach, Manfred (eds.), Towards a history of English as a history of genres, 203–25. Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag C. Winter.Google Scholar
Palmer, Chris C. 2014. Measuring productivity diachronically: Nominal suffixes in English letters, 1400–1600. English Language and Linguistics 19 (1), 107–29.Google Scholar
Pelli, Mario G. 1976. Verb–particle combinations in American English: A study based on American plays from the end of the 18th century to the present. Bern: Francke.Google Scholar
Potter, Simeon. 1965. English phrasal verbs. Philologica Pragensia 8, 285–9.Google Scholar
Quirk, Randolph, Greenbaum, Sidney, Leech, Geoffrey & Svartvik, Jan. 1985. A comprehensive grammar of the English language. London and New York: Longman.Google Scholar
R : A Language and Environment for Statistical Computing. R Core Team. R Foundation for Statistical Computing. Vienna, Austria. 2015. www.R-project.org Google Scholar
Rodríguez-Puente, Paula. 2012a. The development of non-compositional meanings in phrasal verbs: A corpus-based study. English Studies 93 (1), 71–90.Google Scholar
Rodríguez-Puente, Paula. 2012b. Talking ‘private’ with phrasal verbs: A corpus-based study of the use of phrasal verbs in diaries, journals and private letters. In Tÿrkkö, Jukka, Kilpiö, Matti, Nevalainen, Terttu & Rissanen, Matti (eds.), Outposts of historical corpus linguistics: From the Helsinki Corpus to a proliferation of resources (Studies in Variation, Contacts and Change in English 10). Helsinki: University of Helsinki. www.helsinki.fi/varieng/series/volumes/10/rodriguez-puente/ Google Scholar
Rodríguez-Puente, Paula. 2013. The development of phrasal verbs in British English from 1650 to 1990: A corpus-based study. PhD dissertation, University of Santiago de Compostela.Google Scholar
Rodríguez-Puente, Paula. 2014. Colloquialization and ‘decolloquialization’: Phrasal verbs in formal contexts: 1650–1990. In Pfenninger, Simone E., Timofeeva, Olga, Gardner, Anne, Honkapohja, Alpo, Hundt, Marianne & Schreier, Daniel (eds.), Contact, variation and change in the history of English, 163–86. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins.Google Scholar
Scott, Michael. 2012. WordSmith tools version 6. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Shoemaker, Robert B. 2008. The Old Bailey Proceedings and the representation of crime and criminal justice in eighteenth-century London. Journal of British Studies 47 (3), 559–80.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Smitterberg, Erik. 2008. The progressive and phrasal verbs: Evidence of colloquialization in nineteenth-century English? In Nevalainen, Terttu, Taavitsainen, Irma, Pahta, Päivi & Korhonen, Minna (eds.), The dynamics of linguistic variation. Corpus evidence on English past and present, 269–89. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins.Google Scholar
Spasov, Dimiter. 1966. English phrasal verbs. Sofia: Naouka Izkoustvo.Google Scholar
Taavitsainen, Irma. 2001. Changing conventions of writing: The dynamics of genres, text types, and text traditions. European Journal of English Studies 5 (2), 139–50.Google Scholar
Tanabe, Harumi. 1999. Composite predicates and phrasal verbs in The Paston Letters . In Brinton, Laurel & Akimoto, Minoji (eds.), Collocational and idiomatic aspects of composite predicates in the history of English, 97–132. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins.Google Scholar
Thim, Stefan. 2006a. Phrasal verbs in Everyday English: 1500–1700. In Johnston, Andrew James, von Mengden, Ferdinand & Thim, Stefan (eds.), Language and text: Current perspectives on English and Germanic historical linguistics and philology, 291–306. Heidelberg: Winter.Google Scholar
Thim, Stefan. 2006b. Phrasal verbs in Late Middle and Early Modern English: Combinations with back, down, forth, out and up . In Dalton-Puffer, Christiane, Kastovsky, Dieter, Ritt, Nikolaus & Schendl, Herbert (eds.), Syntax, style and grammatical norms: English from 1500–2000, 213–28. Bern: Peter Lang.Google Scholar
Thim, Stefan. 2011. On the phrasal verbs in some Paston Letters . In Bauer, Renate & Krischke, Ulrike (eds.), More than words: English lexicography and lexicology past and present. Essays presented to Hans Sauer on the occasion of his 65th birthday. Part I, 355–85. Bern: Peter Lang.Google Scholar
Thim, Stefan. 2012. Phrasal verbs. The English verb–particle construction and its history. Berlin and New York: Mouton de Gruyter.Google Scholar
Tieken-Boon van Ostade, Ingrid. 2000. Sociohistorical linguistics and the observer's paradox. In Kastovsky, Dieter & Mettinger, Arthur (eds.), The history of English in a social context: A contribution to historical sociolinguistics, 441–61. Berlin and New York: Mouton de Gruyter.Google Scholar
Tieken-Boon van Ostade, Ingrid. 2005. Eighteenth-century English letters: In search of the vernacular. Linguistica e Filologia 21, 113–46.Google Scholar
Tieken-Boon van Ostade, Ingrid. 2009. An introduction to Late Modern English. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.Google Scholar
Widlitzki, Bianca & Huber, Magnus. Forthcoming. Taboo language and swearing in 18th century and 19th century English. A diachronic study based on the Old Bailey Corpus. In María José López-Couso, Belén Méndez-Naya, Paloma Núñez-Pertejo & Ignacio M. Palacios-Martínez (eds.), Corpus linguistics on the move: Exploring and understanding English through corpora. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins.Google Scholar
Wild, Kate. 2010. Attitudes towards English usage in the Late Modern period: The case of phrasal verbs. PhD dissertation, College of Arts, School of Critical Studies, University of Glasgow.Google Scholar
Yáñez-Bouza, Nuria. 2007. Preposition stranding and prescriptivism in English from 1500 to 1900: A corpus-based approach. PhD dissertation, School of Languages, Linguistics and Cultures, University of Manchester.Google Scholar
Yáñez-Bouza, Nuria. 2015. Grammar, rhetoric and usage in English: Preposition placement 1500–1900. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar