A popular phrase making the rounds

Sometimes a language phenomenon gets a name that someone mentions, and the name sticks for one reason or another.  The modern way of expressing action in English is sometimes to add an adverb to the verb and thus change or extend the meaning.  This can occasionally be done with prepositions as well.  We sprayed water on the house to put out the fire is an example.  

It's an unfortunate accident of someone unthinkingly talking about verbs that include an adverb and remarking that now a single word verb has changed into a phrase of words in order to express its full meaning.  The idea caught on with grammarians (who else?!), so they coined the term "phrasal verb."

Nevermind that  linguists (a very different group from grammarians) had  already used the term "verb phrase" to describe the words that make up the verb.  That's because much of the time people use auxiliary verbs with their action words to express tense, progression, reiteration, hypothetical action, or likelihood.  They use a verb phrase to express every negation of action, such as didn't sing, and most questions, like Have you given your dog a bath?

So, why grammarians thought that the term "phrasal verb" needed to be coined is a mystery to me.  It absolutely serves no purpose since a "verb phrase" already existed, and it serves to confuse the two terms by intertwining their ideas.  "Verbal extension" or "verbal addition" might have served as a better descriptive term.  "Pre-auxiliary" (for current auxiliary verbs like did, have, can placed in front of the main verb) and "post-auxiliary" (adverbs added after the main verb like in, out, down, up) might even be better terms.

Consider the sentences below.

We put the plates on the table. (standard meaning)
We put out the fire. (extended meaning)
We put down one of our friends unwittingly. (extended meaning)
We put up with a lot of noise from the children in the crowd. (extended meaning)
We need to put away $300 a month. (extended meaning)
We all put in our money for the donation. (extended meaning)

It's easy to see that the adverb extends the verb's meaning.  But, what grammarians don't do is analyze why that might be true or if it is actually true.  As an example, one has to ask what the noun is following the verb phrase.  Is it the direct object?  If so, it usually immediately follows the verb like plates does in sentence one.  If one moves out from its position of immediately following the main verb to a position after the noun, then yes, the noun is the direct object.  Indeed, that can occur in sentence one.  Since that is true, then out is really an adverb but is idomatically used.  It merely answers in what condition the fire existed.  Thus, out is not part of the verb phrase at all; it's an idiomatic use of an adverb.  That means there is no such thing as a "phrasal verb."

In addition, other adverbs already invade the space of two or three word verb.  For example, in the sentence, I have never seen the Swiss Alps, the verb have seen clearly has the adverb never between the two words of the verb.  Grammarians have never bothered to classify never by any other term than adverb.  It operates the same way as what they call a phrasal verb, however.  It shows an additional aspect to the verb, like all adverbs do because they answer the questions how, when, where, to what extent, and in what condition the action exists within.  So, to separate an adverb into another classification has no justification really.

Grammarians will not have the last word on this issue, nor should they, since they are not the language scientists.  Ask an English major (the usual field of those who claim to be grammarians) if they have taken a linguistics course, and their response is often, "Yeah, but just the introductory course.  Those courses are way too hard, and they focus too much on language."  Right. Grammarians don't have the tools to analyze changes to English structure over time.  They usually follow established rules for written English and don't analyze the more malleable usages of spoken English.

The next time you hear the term "Phrasal Verb," you can dismiss it outright.  It's not set in stone.  The last analysis has not been made.  As long as competing analyses are active, those who analyze language will continue to debate the phrase's structure, its descriptive term, and its effect on semantics.  Till that debate is over, the term is only a notion of a particular group of people.