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The topic of this book fits in with the recently growing interest in phraseology and fixedness in English. It offers a description of multi-word verbs in the language of the 17th and 18th centuries, an important formative period for Modern English. For the first time, multi-word verbs are treated together as a group, as it is argued that phrasal verbs, prepositional verbs, phrasal-prepositional verbs, verb-adjective combinations and verbo-nominal combinations share defining characteristics. These characteristics are also reflected in similar possibilities of usage, in particular the subtle modification of verbal meaning and these verbs' potential for topicalization structures, both leading to a greater expressiveness.Using a new text collection, the Lampeter Corpus of Early Modern English Tracts (1640-1740), the study provides a description of the multi-word verb types found, their syntactic behaviour, and their semantic structure. The composition of the corpus also allowed the examination of the development of these verbs over time and in different registers. The corpus study is supplemented by an investigation of attitudes towards multi-word verbs with the help of contemporary works on language, leading to a more speculative discussion of the factors influencing the choice between multi-word and simplex verbs.
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1. Introduction The decoupling of lexis and syntax leads to the creation of a rubbish dump that is called ‘idiom’, ‘phraseology’, ‘collocation’, and the like. (Sinclair 1991:104) The following study will select some items of the linguistic ‘rubbish dump’ evoked by Sinclair in the above quotation, namely multi-word verbs, and assign them a somewhat more suitable place, perhaps the corridor connecting lexis and syntax. Multi-word verbs have in general received less than adequate treatment so far. Linguists dealing with purely lexical matters, for instance word-formation, have usually excluded them, ostensibly on the grounds that, seen from a formal perspective, they do not constitute ‘words’. But that exclusion seems arbitrary insofar as they constitute le xemes and are formed on the basis of regular patterns. Furthermore, it may lead to embarrassing contradictions, for instance the inclusion of phrasal nouns as opposed to the omission of phrasal verbs in works like Marchand’s (1969). Grammarians, for their part, have also mostly felt ill at ease with multi -word units; while these do have an internal syntactic structure, it is burdened with exceptions in many cases brought about by their lexeme status, so that a special treatment of them is made necessary. Most of all, multi-word verbs have hardly ever been treated as a group as such; rather, individual types are inserted here and there in grammars in many different sections (with the notable exception of Quirk et al. 1985), which makes them very hard to find . In general descriptions of the language they exist on the fringes — as rubbish dumps are of course wont to do. However, they have found a more comfortable shelter in their very own specialized dictionaries (such as Cowie & Mackin 1975), a kind of haven for ‘exotic’ verbs. And yet multi-word verbs are neither exotic nor at the fringes of the English language; rather, they are a part of the mainstream development. To quote Sinclair (1991:68) once more: "the whole drift of the historical devel opment of English has been towards the replacement of words with phrases (...)". I will therefore treat multi -word verbs in the present study as a group in their own right, with an emphasis on their common features, examining their development and behaviour in their authentic textual environments. The time and the basis I have chosen for this consideration is the non-literary prose of the late Early Modern English (EModE) era — that is, precisely the time, the place and the language important for the emergence of m