Phrasal verbs are those verbs that are accompanied by a preposition which changes their meaning completely. They belong to semi-formal and informal registers and have haunted the dreams of L2 and FL English students forever. Phrasal verbs, like paradigms, are a memory game. If you struggle with learning things by heart, those pairs of words must have been your nightmare back in the days. They have been mine for sure, and still are, kind of. At least once a week I get to learn a new one or two, for example last week I learnt to chip in. If you didn’t know, ‘to chip’ means ‘to splinter’, but combined with ‘in’ it becomes ‘to participate with money or time for a group cause or an initiative’.
The mastery of these verbs are perceived to be the threshold that separates a ‘good English’ from a ‘broken English’: people are prone to consider you closer to the English speaking community if you say “Oh, you are buying Jo a Ludwig yearly subscription for her birthday? Can I chip in?” instead of “Can I participate in Jo's birthday gift?”, or if you use “to cut out” instead of “to exclude” in a situation like: “They always cut me out of the conversation”.
Unfortunately, they are not as easy to learn as they are handy. Firstly, because some of them have an absurd amount of different meanings. For instance, the abovementioned ‘ to cut out’ can mean to shape something by cutting; to remove or delete; to stop operating; to suit or fit, as in “I am definitely not cut out for scuba diving”, and to exclude. Although all these meanings don’t differ too much from each other, you know that you’ll never remember all of them.
Secondly, some of their meanings are quite unhinged from those of the core verb. This could be the case of ‘to clam up’. Clams are animals in seashells, and ‘ to clam up’ means ‘to shut up and never open your mouth again’. You kind of see the link now, don’t you? But if you heard it for the first time in a sentence, would you be able to grasp it effortlessly?
Where do phrasal verbs come from?
According to The Historical Rise of the English Phrasal Verb, an enlightening article by George J. M. Lamont - extensively referred to in the following paragraph- phrasal verbs as we intend them today date back to centuries ago and, although Old English didn’t exactly make use of them the way we do now, they were out and about. A bit rarer, but they were there. Instead, a different sort of phrasal verb was around back then, which was the inseparable-prefix verb, for which the preposition was attached to the verb or the noun -but usually the verb- at its beginning. These ones, with a closer look, really resemble modern phrasal verbs in many aspects. It is the case of “to burn” and its phrasal counterpart “to burn up.”: Old English had bærnan and forbærnan.
It is in Middle English times (let’s say Chaucer times, more or less) that a shift in the sentence-construction order changed. This change mostly consisted in putting the verb after the subject instead of putting it after the object at the end of the sentence. Basically it became a little bit more analytic. No clue of what I am talking about? I have you covered with an easy-peasy example.
Let’s pretend that in Old English they had modern words, they would say:
I nothing all day have eaten
In Middle English, people started saying:
I have eaten nothing all day
This new word order meant the world to the English language. The structure of the phrase changed in such a profound way that also phrasal verbs reorganised, and the prefixes detached and shifted after the verb -oh hello there!-. In other words, Old English “forbrecan” became “to break up”. Now, the types of phrasal verbs out in the world in Middle English times were three: the Old English-style particle + verb, like “understand” and “overtake”, then the new ones like “take up” and a third, special one, called “nominal compound”, like “outcry”, for example. So, by the time Shakespeare arrived -together with modern English- phrasal verbs were already there, and also played a consistent role the Bard’s plays.
Is it just English?
If you ever wondered whether other languages, apart from English, have phrasal verbs, the answer is yes, more specifically German, Dutch, Hungarian, Romani, and a couple of others. Furthermore, Slavic languages have something like phrasal verbs, although their prepositions are stuck as prefixes and can't change place in the sentence. Anyway, going back to English, it is clear that phrasal verbs have been playing an important role for anglophones for centuries now. Considering that the only situation in which you are allowed to not use them -in fact, you are encouraged not to- is academic writing, their extensive quantity is more than understandable. The rule can be something like: latin-originated words for academia, phrasal verbs for the rest.
Anyway, if you still have troubles with phrasal verbs and you can’t pull it off, pull out for a trip to England and you will see you’ll pull through so well you could even pull down a decent income from your English. Don’t forget to bring a pullover with you though.
Ps. Pullover is not a phrasal verb. It’s a warm jumper.