Phrasal verbs: delivering on a trend

A couple of years ago, I worked on two phrasal verb projects for Collins, a new edition of the Collins COBUILD Phrasal Verbs Dictionary and Work on your Phrasal Verbs (2e), with my friend and frequent collaborator, Penny Hands. We ended up having quite a few discussions about the increasing trend for phrasal verbs and the reasons behind it. Penny wrote a post about it on the Collins ELT blog in which she discusses not just the completely new phrasal verbs that have come into use, but also the trend to add particles after verbs more often.

Since then, it’s something I can’t help noticing, both in everyday life and when I’m researching language for other projects. Last week, I was looking at the verb deliver and came across another phrasal verb trend that seems to have built over the past few years, deliver on sth.

 

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It isn’t a completely new combination, of course. Looking back at the old BNC compiled in the mid-1990s, I can find examples of the classic collocation, deliver on a promise, plus just 2 or 3 similar objects:

 

Looking at more recent corpus data though, it’s clear that classic collocation has expanded to include a much greater range of objects in recent years:

 

And it’s been extended from people delivering on promises, to things, especially products, delivering on what you’d hoped for: