Comment on Are separable verbs a thing in ENG?

• AskewLord@piefed.social ⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  those aren’t the same thing.

  a german separable verb, like ‘einsteigen’ (to board, get on) literally translated would be

  Please get the train to which you are boarding on.

  the separable part is the last word in the sentence/clause. we don’t do that in english.

  you don’t say ' cool the reaction that we are afraid is going to blow up down’. like, technically you could, but nobody speaks like that and if they did you’d think they were an idiot.

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  • CombatWombat@feddit.online ⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    I think you’re overstating your position here. Many phrasal verbs are most natural when the verb and preposition are separated, and you would not think they were an idiot for separating them:

    • I’m going to call my best friend Lenora up
    • thank you for cheering my depressed capybara Luis up
    • I think we need to cut the gnarly old oak tree down

    Maybe it’s not as dramatic as German, but it’s still a correct example and something a native speaker would produce.

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    • bigbangdangler@reddthat.com ⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      There are also working memory constraints, or similar real-time processing constraints, at play which can affect how acceptable (in terms of native speaker intuition) some examples are.

      • I’m going to call my best friend Lenora up (very acceptable)
      • I’m going to call my best friend Lenora, who I’ve known since high school, up (less acceptable)
      • I’m going to call my best friend and longtime dancing partner from Brighton, Lenora up (less acceptable, comma for written clarity only)

      I won’t get into the possible differences in the intervening structures (e.g. the relative clause), but as a mostly fair generalization: in these cases, the preference to split the verb into parts is inversely correlated with the number of intervening elements.

      • I’m going to call up my best friend and longtime dancing partner from Brighton, Lenora (more acceptable than above)

      Something similar occurs without phrasal verbs but with indirect objects optionally expressed as prepositional phrases:

      • I gave an extremely rare and hard-to-find cassette tape from Tokyo in the 1980s to Mary (still acceptable, but right on the cusp of awkward)
      • I gave Mary an extremely rare and hard-to-find cassette tape from Tokyo in the 1980s (better)

      The similarities suggest that the pattern has more to do with heavy intervening phrases, or even more generally syntactic headedness, and not wanting to rebuild or finish building earlier structures later in the parse.

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      • CombatWombat@feddit.online ⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

        Ooh, this is a very interesting line of inquiry! Is there any evidence of differences in the working memory of language speakers where there is more tolerance on the amount of words between separable verbs, like the 50 word intervals in German mentioned elsewhere? Your longer examples are starting to get very Silas Mariner energy.

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    • AskewLord@piefed.social ⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      Those all sound weird/dumb in English. Yes, some native speakers would produce that, but you’d never be taught English that way, because it’s not standard English.

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      • CombatWombat@feddit.online ⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

        I think what you’re telling me is you’re a native German speaker, and if so I might say you’re on rather tenuous ground telling a native english speaker what sounds weird and dumb in their native language.

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    • Zwuzelmaus@feddit.org ⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      I have noticed that all these examples in English have some kind of “spatial relation” as their second part: up, on, in, off… are these the only ones in English that are really separable, where you really can put other words in between?

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