The English Phrasal Verb 1650-Present

Providing a detailed and comprehensive account of the development of phrasal verbs from early modern to present-day English this study covers almost 400 years in the history of English and provides both a diachronic and synchronic account based on over 12000 examples extracted from stratified electronic corpora. The corpus analysis provides evidence of how registers can inform us about the history of English as it traces and compares the usage and stylistic drifts of phrasal verbs across ten different genres - drama fiction journals diaries letters medicine news science sermons and trial proceedings. The study also sheds new light on the morpho-syntactic and semantic features of phrasal verbs proposing a new approach to the category considering not only on their grammatical features but also their historical development by discussing the category in terms of a number of central mechanisms of language change.