26. Why English Has So Many Phrasal Verbs

Star-Spangled Stories. Article 26.

Why English Has So Many Phrasal Verbs

Why an American says give up instead of "surrender", where verbs with little words at the end came from, and why they are not as illogical as they seem.

You get up (get up), get dressed (put on your clothes), leave the house (set off), collect a friend on the way (pick up), complete a test at school (fill in), spend the afternoon with friends (hang out) and switch off your computer in the evening (turn off). You have spent the whole day with English phrasal verbs – and we have not even started on put up with.

For many Czech students, phrasal verbs are a nightmare. They look like random combinations of verbs and prepositions that have to be crammed by heart. Why does look after mean "take care of", when look is "dívat se" and after is "po"? In fact, phrasal verbs have their own history and their own logic, and Czech is much closer to them than we think.

What a phrasal verb is

A phrasal verb consists of a verb and one or two short particles (particles), for example up, down, out, off, on, in, away, back, over. Together they create a new meaning. Sometimes the meaning is literal and easy to guess: sit down (sednout si), go out (jít ven), come back (vrátit se). At other times it is idiomatic and cannot be worked out from the individual parts: give up (vzdát se), turn down (odmítnout), put up with (snášet, tolerovat).

What is more, one verb can have several completely different meanings depending on the context. A good example is take off:

The name phrasal verb itself is younger than you might think. It was brought into common use by the American-British essayist Logan Pearsall Smith in his book Words and Idioms from 1925. He admitted that the term had been suggested to him by Henry Bradley, one of the chief editors of the great Oxford dictionary. The constructions themselves, however, are hundreds of years old.

Czech does it too – just at the front

Now for a surprise. Czech has something very similar, only it puts it in front of the verb instead of after it. We call them prefixes. Compare:

The Czech prefix and the English particle do the same job: they specify the direction or the result of an action. Vyjít means to go and end up outside – and so does go out. Dojíst means to eat until nothing is left – and so does eat up. For a Czech student this is good news. If you imagine a phrasal verb as a verb with a prefix that has simply moved behind it, many of them start to make sense.

Where phrasal verbs came from

In this respect, Old English (roughly 450–1100) looked similar to German. It used many prefixes like a-, be-, for-, ge-, on-, tō-, and alongside them particles that could stand after the verb. The verb ūtgān (literally "out-go") existed alongside phrases like gān ūt.

During late Old English and Middle English (about 1100–1500), however, many prefixes stopped being used or lost their clear meaning. At the same time, English was losing its endings and began to rely on fixed word order. Particles after the verb turned out to be a more practical solution: they are visible, easy to combine and their meaning is clear. By around 1500, phrasal verbs were already very common, and Shakespeare used hundreds of them.

It used to be said that phrasal verbs were brought to English by the Vikings, because the Scandinavian languages have similar constructions (Norwegian gi opp = give up). Old Norse influence may have supported the development, especially in the north of England. But today's researchers, such as Stefan Thim, stress that Old English already had particle verbs and that it was mainly an internal development of the language itself, not an import.

Two Englishes side by side: a phrasal verb or a Latin word?

After 1066, a huge number of words came into English from French and later from Latin (we wrote about this in the article Why Isn't English Written the Way It Sounds?). So English often got two verbs for the same action: a short native phrasal verb and a longer borrowed word. The phrasal verb sounds informal and friendly, the Latin word formal and official.

Czech students often tend to use the Latin words because they know them from Czech: continue reminds them of kontinuita, return of a return in tennis, and investigate of investigativní žurnalistika. But in everyday conversation they sound like an official letter. An American in a shop does not say I will return tomorrow, but I'll come back tomorrow.

Particles have their own meanings

The biggest secret of phrasal verbs is that the particles are not random. Each one has several typical meanings that repeat in dozens of verbs. Once you know them, you can often guess the meaning of a new verb:

Take up. When you clean up something, you clean all of it. Eat up means to eat everything, use up to use to the very last bit, fill up to fill right to the top. Here up does not mean "upwards" but "completely", exactly like the Czech prefixes do- or vy- (dojíst, vypotřebovat). Similarly, out often means that something has come to an end: We ran out of milk (there is no milk left), The tickets sold out (there are no tickets left).

Why native speakers love them

Phrasal verbs are short, clear and extremely creative. English constantly makes new combinations from them. From the age of computers and the internet come log in, sign up, back up, zoom in, scroll down and plug in. Young Americans hang out (spend time together), chill out (relax) or freak out (panic).

Phrasal verbs also easily turn into nouns. You just join the words: a takeoff (vzlet), a breakdown (porucha, zhroucení), a workout (cvičení), a checkout (pokladna v obchodě), a login (přihlášení), a setup (nastavení), a lockdown (uzávěra). Czech has borrowed some of them too – just think of the lockdown of 2020.

A little grammar: where does the object go?

Phrasal verbs also have their own grammar rules, which we cover in detail in lesson 3.1b Phrasal verbs. Here are just the most important ones:

Separable verbs (separable) can have the object in the middle or at the end: Turn off the light. = Turn the light off. When the object is a pronoun (it, them, him...), it must go in the middle: Turn it off. Never "turn off it" – that is one of the most common mistakes.

Inseparable verbs (inseparable) cannot be split: I look after my little brother. → I look after him. Similarly get over it, run into her, look into it.

Three-part verbs have two particles, and the object always goes at the end: I can't put up with the noise. (Nesnesu ten hluk.) We ran out of time. (Došel nám čas.) I'm looking forward to the weekend. Careful: look forward to is followed by the -ing form: I'm looking forward to seeing you.

How to learn phrasal verbs

A list of two hundred phrasal verbs in alphabetical order is a reliable recipe for forgetting them quickly. These methods work better:

By particle. Learn a group of verbs with up or off and look for the shared meaning. The particle will then help you even with verbs you have never seen.

By topic. Morning (wake up, get up, get dressed), travel (check in, set off, take off, get on, get off), relationships (get along with, fall out with, break up, make up).

In a whole sentence. Do not write down give up = vzdát se, but Don't give up! You can do it! A sentence carries its grammar and style with it.

Conclusion: small words with great power

Phrasal verbs are not an invention English uses to torture students. They are the result of a thousand years of development, in which the language swapped prefixes for particles after the verb. For Czechs, the key is to realize that they do the same job as Czech prefixes. And next time you hear an American say I give up, you will know that there is a piece of English history in those two words.