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Particle Verbs in English A Cognitive Linguistic Perspective
Han Luo
Singapore:
Springer, 2019 Hardcover.
xvii+180 p. ISBN 978-9811368530. £74.99
Reviewed by Jean
Albrespit Université Bordeaux
Montaigne
Han Luo’s book is
based on her doctoral dissertation. The language is clear and fluid and makes a
pleasant read. It is well-documented and provides the reader with a
state-of-the-art review of the literature on particle verbs, which in itself is
most interesting. The theoretical framework chosen for this study is that of
Cognitive Grammar and it aims to categorize particle verbs using semantic
classification. This approach provides a new perspective on a much-studied
topic. The study is dictionary-based and corpus-based (the corpus used –
sporadically – is the British National Corpus). It focuses on language at
sentence level. The book is organized
around five main chapters (besides a substantial introduction – chapter 1 – and
a conclusion – chapter 6), chapters 2 and 3 explaining the theory underlying
the study and the different cognitive models (more specifically the
conceptualization of “event”), chapter 4, the placement of the particle and chapter
5, a study of particle verbs in the light of idiomaticity and semantic
extension. An abstract is
provided at the beginning of each chapter, a summary and a very informative
list of references close each chapter. A summary is also provided by way of
conclusion for each subpart. Transitions between subparts and chapters are
smooth. This means that navigating this book is an enjoyable experience. The
author has undeniably pedagogical qualities and clearly wishes to be as explicit
as possible, even if this results in some repetitions. The text has been
carefully proofread (there is only a slight mistake in the numbering of
examples [128-129]). There is no index of terms or concepts – such an index
would have been useful. The book ends with two appendices containing a test
administered to native speakers and a list of 150 particle verbs that only
allow one order (V-NP-Part or V-Part-NP) in the Collins COBUILD Dictionary of Phrasal Verbs (1989). Ch. 1 (introduction)
addresses the distinction between verb + particle constructions (“pick up”) and verb + preposition
constructions (“run into”) and the classification
of phrasal verbs according to the transitivity of the verb (“Poirot found out the details”), its
intransitivity (“The prices came down
last month”), or a complex particle-verb construction (“They made John out a liar”). Only the
first two categories are examined in this book. Han Luo then analyses the
semantic tri-partition of particle verbs – compositional, idiomatic and
aspectual – and holds that these distinctions are not always clear-cut and are
more often than not a matter of degree. The notion of idiomaticity (defined as follows: “the meaning of a composite
expression is more than the sum of its parts or cannot be predicted from its
components in isolation” [7]), in particular, is seen as correlated to that of semantic extension. The author then
argues in favour of a different categorization and postulates three groups of
particle verbs: directional, resultative and aspectual. She claims that these
verbs are analysable “in the sense that native speakers are aware that the
components (verb and particle), respectively, contribute to the meaning of
particle verbs as a whole” [8] but that some particle verbs are unanalysable. In Ch. 2, Han Luo, after
a thorough investigation of the literature on particle verbs, sets about
justifying the choice of Cognitive Linguistics as a theoretical framework.
According to the author, “this view of language has the potential to give a
unified explanation to the semantic and syntactic complexities as manifested in
English particle verbs.” Ch. 3 is about the
syntax of the “verb + particle” expression and more specifically the conceptual
content of particle-verb schemas. The schemas are deemed meaningful because of their
conceptual content. The author examines definitions of cognitive models and
conceptual events as propounded by Langacker, Goldberg, Dirven and Verspoor,
Lakoff and Johnson, Fauconnier and Turner. She then focuses on Talmy’s (2000)
theory of the Motion Event, which is a prototype from which the State Change
Event and the Aspect Event are derived. Han Luo endorses Talmy’s
conceptualization. The Motion Event (“Mary
threw a box out”) is construed as the conceptual content of particle-verb
schemas obtained from directional particle verbs. The particle designates the
Path of Motion. The State Change Event (“The
candle blew out”) is embodied by resultative particle verbs with the
particle denoting the state change or the resultant state. In the Aspect Event
(“He wrote up this report”) the
particle carries the aspect of the described event. However, as the author
states: “The aspectual nature of the particle […] is inherited from the meaning
of particle-verb schemas rather than attributed to the sematic extension of
individual particles” [81]. This chapter also features the results of a survey in which a small panel of native speakers were
asked to decide which semantic group a selection of 50 particle verbs (out of a
list of 200) belonged to and lends weight to the author’s proposed
classification. The aim of Ch. 4 is
to account for the position of the particle (called “particle placement”) with transitive
verbs (pick up the pen: "continuous
order” vs pick the pen up: “discontinuous
order”). This chapter focuses on idiomatic expressions such as “She fought back the tears” / "You’ll have to
put your foot down.” The constraint in idiomatic particle verbs, as in the
two examples “fight back” / "put X down” is
explained by the way the particle verb has developed its idiomatic meaning:
discontinuous order if the idiomatic meaning is extended from the inference
associated with the sequential construal, continuous if developed from the
inference of the holistic construal. With non-idiomatic verbs, the author
stresses that “construal is largely a matter of emphasis” [116]. In the rest of
the chapter, in a very interesting but disappointingly short section
(“Corpus-Based Evidence”), Han Luo proceeds to test her results on a corpus of
500 “key particle verbs” extracted from the Collins
COBUILD Dictionary of Phrasal Verbs. Ch. 5 examines the idiomaticity
of particle verbs as stemming from semantic extension in two aspects: the
“levels” of semantic extension and the cognitive mechanisms (pragmatic strengthening,
vantage point, profiling, framing, metonymy and conceptual metaphor) that
motivate it. Semantic extension refers to a change in the use of the verb
through metonymy or metaphor, for instance “fish"
in "fish out a ring.” The author
demonstrates that the idiomaticity of particle verbs is not only due to the
semantic extension of the particle (as is claimed in the studies she has
reviewed) but to the various “levels” (a debatable term) of the construction: the
semantic extension of the verb, the particle, both the verb and the particle,
the subject and object taken by the verb, the particle-verb schemas, the full
particle verb and different levels simultaneously. A scale of idiomaticity is
defined. The argumentation is convincing, although saying that “out” “means visible” or “invisible” in two
examples [129] seems to be a shortcut which should be supported by a closer
analysis. Ch. 6 concludes the
book with a summary of the major findings, practical implications for the
teaching of English as a second language, an honest account of the limitations
of the study and suggestions for further studies of particle verbs. In conclusion, the
reader will find thorough and reliable analyses in this book. It has a few minor
defects inherent in the conversion of a PhD thesis into a monograph: a rather conventional
introduction of the research questions, a presentation of the theoretical
framework which tends to be a bit lengthy (compared to the systematic study of
the corpus which arrives rather late in the game, page 117). The author’s voice
deserves to be heard more forcefully. These remarks are not aimed at
diminishing the value of the book, which will be a great reference book for
scholars and students on a linguistic phenomenon at the interface of semantics
and syntax. ___________________ Reference: Talmy, L. Toward a Cognitive Semantics (Vol. II). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press,
2000.
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