I was in a bookstore** a few weeks ago, and I saw a mother there with her daughter, who looked to be about 3 1/2 years old. While the mother calmly leafed through some books, the little girl also took the liberty to take some books off a shelf and look at them. Her mother called her so that they could leave, and the little girl started to try to put the book back on the shelf. But she couldn't, because the other books were there and the space was too tight. She started to get frustrated, and her mother called her again, also getting a bit frustrated that the girl hadn't yet come to her.
Finally, the little girl shouts, "Mama! Help me to put!"
It was such a cute little utterance to me, and so perfectly demonstrated a feature of verb usage here that I had been noticing-- for what are typically phrasal verbs in "my neck of the woods" (Southern USA), the use of the corresponding preposition is optional, OR the verb is substituted for a non-phrasal verb.
You may be thinking-- What???
OK- I've just discovered a lovely website called englishpage.com, with some very useful definitions, examples, and lists of English grammatical structures. They define a phrasal verb as "a verb plus a preposition or adverb which creates a meaning different from the original verb." It may help to think of the following examples:
to cut
to cut off
to cut in
to cut out
to cut up
Think of the variations of all the completely different meanings of "to turn" when you add different prepositions. Think of "put", "put up", "put with", and "put up with." Interesting, right?
Evidently there are separable and inseparable phrasal verbs. This distinction explains why it "sounds funny" to say "leave off it" rather than "leave it off." Leave off would be a separable phrasal verb. By the way, there are also phrasal verbs that don't really have a preference as to position of the object.
I had noticed that in Singapore, many of the phrasal verbs I typically grew up with are used differently. This list will be far from comprehensive, but it may be interesting and amusing to read for you Standard [Southern] American English speakers out there.
put on- wear ex. "Wear your shoes."
take off- take ex. "Why you take the hat?"
clean up- keep ex. "Children, keep the toys!"
hold on[to]- hold ex. "Hold your dog!"
take off- remove ex. "Remove the paper from the table."
pick up- carry ex. "I want to carry the baby."
pick out- choose ex. "Everyone may choose 1 color."
look at- see ex. "See the squirrel."
throw away- throw ex. "Throw the tissue."
**keep can be particularly confusing at first-- since keep to me means to keep on your person, and usually here it means to put the object in its place, away from your person
I'm not saying that people NEVER use phrasal verbs, or implying that they don't use them "correctly"; it's just a tendency that I have noticed. And honestly, I believe that any Standard American English speaker would look at the above list and say that yes, put on typically means wear. I agree, but I admit that my ears perk up when time and time again, young and old, in formal and informal situations, it seems that the non-phrasal verb is preferred.
For some reason, it can be comforting to venture out and learn a new language, but to still see similarities with that new language and your native language. The first foreign language I studied was French, and while it was interesting to get to know what a rich verb morphology was like, what you could do with gender aspect on the noun phrase, part of me wondered why my best friend next to me, who had grown up speaking Spanish at home, was always exclaiming in wonder, "This is just like Spanish!" It was like she got to rediscover her native language as she studied the foreign language.
I finally got to experience this feeling when I studied Swedish in Sweden. Suddenly, English had roots and relations and a history that was fascinating to imagine. I was similarly reassured when studying German in Germamy, when we learned about trennbare Verben. These verbs reminded me of phrasal verbs, but with the complicating addition of CASE (dative, accusative). What had for so long seemed like a clumsy, awkward, and easily errored structure in English suddenly had a place in the history of languages. I could now claim to be staying in touch with my Germanic language roots by using sentences such as, "Put it up!" Forget the whole rule about not ending sentences with a preposition.
Hm... I admit, though, that as I use phrasal verbs to the best of my ability, I often wonder about that rule. It's like this guilty-conscience thing those of us have who've studied the English language or literature. How do we say it then, when the most natural way has the preposition at the end??? Maybe I should adopt the Singaporean English way and just avoid the use of phrasal verbs. If I did that, this is how my first paragraph would read:
I was in a bookstore a few weeks ago, and I saw a mother there with her daughter, who looked to be about 3 1/2 years old. While the mother calmly perused some books, the little girl also took the liberty to remove some books from a shelf and examine them. Her mother called her so that they could leave, and the little girl started to try to replace the book on the shelf. But she couldn't, because the other books were there and the space was too tight. She started to get frustrated, and her mother called her again, also getting a bit frustrated that the girl hadn't yet come to her.
Not too different, but changed enough to notice the difference.
** written in Singapore, 2010
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