Phrasal Verbs Consisting of Polysyllabic Verb of French Origin + Preposition in the Oxford English Dictionary

Abstract

In this paper, the first appearances of phrasal verbs consisting of “polysyllabic verb of French origin + preposition” were manually extracted from the Oxford English Dictionary second edition. Furthermore, following the studies by Kamiya (2020), Kamiya and Nakagawa (2021), the paper discusses the properties of phrasal verbs consisting of “a verb and a preposition.” It is said that phrasal verbs consisting of “verb of French origin + preposition” started being mass-produced with the occurrence of modern English (i.e., from 1500). However, phrasal verb consisting of “three (four)-syllable verb of French origin + preposition” were mass-produced after 1850. Unlike one-syllable verbs of Germanic origin, polysyllabic verbs of French origin retain their original and formal meanings. When combined with prepositions, they are not used colloquially, unlike phrasal verbs consisting of “verb of Germanic origin + preposition.”