Speak Like Native: How are phrasal verbs used in speaking English?

How are phrasal verbs used in speaking English?

How are phrasal verbs used in speaking English?

How are phrasal verbs used in speaking English?

Brian Collins

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As explained by Brain “Hypothetically, no. But lacking these things will make what you can say more limited and your English less and less targetlike”.

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How are phrasal verbs used in speaking English?

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Speak Like Native: How are phrasal verbs used in speaking English?

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How are phrasal verbs used in speaking English?

Phrasal Verbs – English Vocabulary

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How are phrasal verbs used in speaking English?

How are phrasal verbs used in speaking English?

Do you need to know phrasal verbs to speak English with native speakers?

Answer by Brian Collins, ( PhD candidate in linguistics at University of Queensland ). All credit goes to Brian Collins, Thank you!

why I can understand English, but I can’t speak English well
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Hypothetically, no.

 You also don’t need articles, tense markers, person agreement, or the passive voice, but lacking these things will make what you can say more limited and your English less and less targetlike.

Phrasal verbs are complicated but I don’t recommend skipping them.

It is untrue that they are all idiomatic, all completely mysterious, all slang and informal, and are all synonymous with other words. You cannot just replace them with a thesaurus and I say this not as an authority figure, but as someone who has looked through tonnes of terrible ESL writing as a teacher.

If you replace the phrase ‘Wolves dig dens out from snow’ with #‘Wolves delve dens from snow’ it sounds like nonsense, and your teacher might get a laugh from reading it. Use a surgical term like probe and it sounds even funnier.

 Most phrasal verbs add a degree of telicity (completeness) or else imply a direction for a verb. For example, if someone ‘eats a sandwich’ there may be half a sandwich left. If someone ‘eats a sandwich up’ there is none left. Adding the progressive ending -ing to #eating up is weird because it views the action as a stage rather than a complete one.

Eating up is not really a synonym of eat. That is like saying redo is a synonym of do—no it is a different morphological form.

At does the opposite with phrasal verbs. It suggest the action was/is/is going to be only partly done. If someone eats at a sandwich, the sandwich is most definitely not gone. If someone reads at a book, they definitely did not read all the way through it, if someone grabs at my leg, they will not actually grab it sucessfully.

Then the exceptions are when at is directional: look at, laugh at, strike at, drive at, and so on.

Those are not opaque in their meaning.

There are some phrasal verbs which are much more opaque and usually result through some stages of semantic drift, especially sexual ones (e.g., eat out), but these, in my opinion at least, are the exceptions.

It is also a bit silly to me when ESL resources claim there are ‘hundreds’ of phrasal verbs. Try tens of thousands!

 The process of forming them is semi-productive. English gets a new word and then suddenly, speaker adds up to it to make it finished, or adds up to make it complete, or through to show some sort of movement… then we have:

• speculate~speculate on (something)
• google~google through
• sushi~sushi up

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Reference: Brian Collins, “Do you need to know phrasal verbs to speak English with native speakers?” originally appeared on Quora, the place to gain and share knowledge, empowering people to learn from others and better understand the world. Fix your English Grammar

How are phrasal verbs used in speaking English?

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How are phrasal verbs used in speaking English?