This book responds with theoretical and practical analysis of key topics, from a global range of contributors. Online dictionaries and reference tools are increasingly prevalent in a digitized and internet-led era in language study that has embraced computational linguistics. The author argues that their common perception as particularly ‘English’, ‘colloquial’ and ‘informal’ has its origin in the eighteenth-century normative tradition.ĭescription : This book looks at current research and future directions in e-lexicography. In this context the question is discussed to what extent the older prefixes were replaced by particles and borrowed prefixes, how the characteristic etymological and semantic properties of the Modern English phrasal verbs can be explained and what role they play in the lexicon. The interplay of phonological, morphological, syntactic and semantic factors in the loss of the native prefixes in the history of English is investigated. From a cross-linguistic and comparative perspective the Old English prefix verbs are identified as preverbs and the shift towards postposition of the particles is connected to the development of more general patterns of word order. A contrastive survey of the basic semantic and syntactic characteristics of verb-particle constructions in the present-day Germanic languages shows that the English construction is structurally unremarkable and its analysis as a periphrastic word-formation is proposed.
Description : The book traces the evolution of the English verb-particle construction (‘phrasal verb’) from Indo-European and Germanic up to the present.