Re: (In)transitive verbs

On Sat, 7 Feb 2004, Tristan McLeay <zsau@...> wtote:

> 'Phrasal verbs' are little more than verbs composed of two parts, the
> first part of which is (almost?) always the same as a verb and the second
> is (almost?) always the same as a preposition. Shreyas adequately shows
> that they _aren't_ prepositions, but they also aren't adverbs:
  However, Hungarian adequately shows that "prepositions" (or
prefixes in Hungarian) are semantically allative adverbs (i.e.
expressing ditection towards an object). In English it's hard to
demonstrate allative adverbs -- I wonder if I can with my language
apparatus --, because they are morphologically same as locative
ones.

  When "John gave it in", he makes a motion towards an inner
location from his close proximity. On the contrary, in the sentence
"John gave it slowly" no direction is involved.

  Of course, when we do a directional movement, this will have a
certain end-point. No matter how slowly gave John it in, he will
finally pass it to another persion. Therefore phrasal verbs are
very suitable for expressing instantaneous, perfective,
terminative, resultative etc. connotation. In this case the
allative adverb can be semantically shifted to an aspectual marker;
and even it probably has no directional meaning any more, like eg.
Hungarian verbal prefix <meg-> (originally 'behind (direction)',
nowadays to form perfective verbs). This dichotomy exists in the
English phrasal verb "give up", cf.
- "John gave up his seat": it's directional, he stood _up_ and left
  his seat
- "John gave up his plan". it's figurative, no direction, only the
  motif of the discontinuance.