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:

 

Researching phrasal verbs: showing my workings

This is kind of the post behind the post. I recently wrote a post for the Collins ELT blog about how we updated the new edition of Work on Your Phrasal Verbs. I was asked to make it a short, simple post for a wide audience. You can read the post here - it summarizes the key changes in terms of updating the phrasal verbs we included to reflect current usage (we changed around 10% of the PV list) and also how we reworked the design to include more space for practice activities.  What the post doesn’t have space for is explaining how we did that. So, I thought I’d write this post-behind-the-post to give those of you who like that kind of thing a few more of the nerdy details.

Updating the PV list was a fairly straightforward case of checking the current corpus frequencies of the PVs in the first edition and highlighting any that had declined in usage. I say “straightforward” – actually checking the frequency of phrasal verbs is far from straightforward, but I’m not going to get into that here! Then the Collins corpus team generated a list of possible new additions based on the most high-frequency PVs that weren’t included in the first edition. I checked the most likely candidates manually, chose suitable options, and we worked out how to shuffle things around to fit the new additions into the themed units to replace those we’d dropped.

When we were initially reviewing the first edition, I'd highlighted the fact that most of the existing practice activities focused on the basic meaning of the PVs, so a largely receptive focus. With an extra page per unit for new activities, I suggested we could use the space to build on the receptive/meaning-focused exercises by adding new ones that looked more at the kind of things learners need to know to use PVs productively. For me, it was this bit that turned out to be the most interesting part of the project as I got to do original corpus research, then put it directly into practice.

In my Collins post, I pick out four main areas we focused on – and I also made some pretty graphics around them for an instagram post which I’m going to unapologetically reuse!

Typical Collocations:

This is a biggie because collocations are not only important for using language in a way that sounds natural - and produces predictable combinations of words that readers and listeners will expect and not ‘trip over’ – but collocations such as typical subjects and objects also tell you a huge amount about how and where the target PV is typically used. Is it used to talk about serious or fairly frivolous topics? Are the subjects positive or negative things? What types of people do this thing? Is it informal and conversational or something more likely to crop up in business communications or journalism?

Here are some of the pages and pages of notes I made as I researched each PV.

You can see very clearly that, in terms of typical objects, we drop off both objects and people:

 

For intransitive PVs, the subjects are obviously more interesting, like here at (not) add up:

 

Or here you can see what kinds of people tend to step down:

 

For ditransitive verbs, like remind sb of sth, I looked at both the direct and indirect objects:

And sometimes I noted down both subjects and objects as worth highlighting, such as here you can see who lays off who:

 

But it’s not just about the nouns. There are the adverbs too that you can see above with step down immediately/voluntarily and not really add up. Or even the quantifiers, lay off a lot of/hundreds of …  .

I used all this mass of information to create activities that focus specifically on collocation, like the one above, but I also tried to include the strongest collocates of each PV throughout the unit, including them in examples where they weren’t the main focus.

Colligation patterns:

These are the grammatical patterns that PVs tend to be used in. At the simplest level, do you carry on read, carry on to read or carry on reading? While scrolling through corpus lines, I often found myself noting down following patterns, some of them simple, like a following -ing form or a wh- clause as above. Some like at make up for were more complex, taking in direct objects, -ing forms, wh- clauses and also a passive plus preposition combo (be made up for in …) and a preceding phrase (more than made up for …)

 

Other common preceding patterns I noted included modals and other introductory verbs (do they have a name?), like try to, fail to, go and …

Again, some of these made their way into explicit exercises highlighting the patterns, often matching sentence halves, while others just loitered in general examples, building the picture for students of typical usage in the background.

Prepositions:

Slightly confusingly for learners, phrasal verbs often co-occur with specific prepositions that aren’t strictly part of the phrasal verb itself, because they’re optional or vary depending on what follows. They’re at the niggly, detailed end of language learning, but they can make a real difference to how language flows and to how listeners/readers are able to process a sentence. Imagine you read “They fell out with …”, you expect what follows to be a person, not an issue and if it isn’t, you hesitate, maybe reread, wonder if you’ve understood correctly.

Word order:

All of the above categories apply to almost any type of word, but this last issue is uniquely phrasal-verby. ELT materials commonly teach about the difference between separable and inseparable phrasal verbs, often in a one-off section, but once students have grasped the concept, they need to know how it applies to specific PVs they come across. Does the object always appear between the verb and the particle or always after the particle? If both are possible, is there a tendency one way or the other? Can a PV only be split by a pronoun or are there other pronoun-like words that can go in-between, like everyone, things, etc.?

As you can see, I had hours of nerdy fun researching all this stuff which I then tried to cram into a few short pages. I just hope that students get out at least some of what went in!

More about the book here.

 

Post-lockdown Coronavocab: pre-booking & walk-ups

This sign outside a local museum recently caught my eye because it contains interesting examples of two word types I’ve been working with lately; prefixes (pre-booked) and phrasal verbs/derived nouns (walk-ups). They also seem to reflect something of the new normal, in the UK at least, at the moment.

Pre-booked

This is one for the pedants out there! Because, of course, if you book something, you reserve it or buy your ticket in advance. So, what then is pre-booking? The pre- seems like a somewhat unnecessary prefix. And the difference between booking and pre-booking does seem to be a subtle one. Pre-booking simply emphasizes how far in advance you book. It can describe a situation where you can reserve something before it’s officially available to buy. It can just signify the need to book something well ahead rather than leaving it to the last minute and potentially losing out. And in this case, it emphasizes the idea that people need to book their tickets, probably online, ahead of arriving at the venue to avoid crowds of people queuing up.

Until quite recently, in the UK, almost anywhere you visited - a museum, exhibition, garden, restaurant and even most train tickets – had to be booked in advance and typically for a specific time slot in order to help venues to control the number of customers and avoid crowds of people. According to Merriam-Webster, prebook was first used back in 1855, but there does seem to be evidence that it’s seen a spike in usage in the past year (not sure what the spike in 2014 was down to).

Walk-ups

As regulations relax here, however, more places are starting to accept walk-ups; customers who arrive on the day without a booking.

Interestingly, this sense of walk-up doesn’t seem to feature in most dictionaries. Most list the US sense to refer to a multi-floor building without a lift/elevator where you literally have to walk up the stairs. M-W also has a sense “designed to allow pedestrians to be served without entering a building” as in a walk-up coffee counter, also a common feature of pandemic life where anything designed to keep people outdoors has flourished.

The walk-up counter at a local coffee shop

Corpus data shows that the ‘customer arriving on spec’ sense has been around for a while, although the inverted commas around the first example perhaps hint at the term’s origins as trade jargon rather than common everyday usage:

There has very clearly though been a significant jump in usage, which I suspect is less about this being a new term than the fact that, in a time of changing rules and norms, we have more need to differentiate between customers who pre-book and those who arrive on spec, and more clarity over what’s possible. [Note the stats here are for all senses of walk-up.]

Interestingly, the 2020-21 data shows lots of walk-up Covid testing sites, but also starts to hint at the opening-up of other venues to casual custom.

Walk-ins

And just when I thought this post was ready to go, I headed out for a walk to take photos of a couple of local walk-up coffee counters and … 1 I found one of my favourite coffee shops has moved its counter indoors – another sign of changing times, but still great coffee – 2 I came across several signs for walk-ins … So, I scurried back to my corpus to check it out.

A sign outside a local bar

 

And in the window of a barbers

Again, this is polysemous with its most common use as an adjective to describe large storage spaces – walk-in wardrobes/closets/freezers. I also found several dictionary entries for both the adjective and noun forms to refer to (places that accept) customers who arrive without a booking – most labelled as (mainly) US. The corpus data I looked at for walk-in suggested a more even US/UK/other split than for walk-up (which was quite US-heavy) and it also showed an upward trend in 2020 (again for all uses), although slightly less pronounced.

 

I don’t know about you, but it was the final example above that really typified my recent experience of either not going out because it’s too much of a nuisance to get a booking or of shivering outside in a not-very-summery British summer!