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.
Comment on Are separable verbs a thing in ENG?
CombatWombat@feddit.online 1 week agoI 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.
AskewLord@piefed.social 1 week ago
CombatWombat@feddit.online 1 week 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.
AskewLord@piefed.social 1 week ago
No, I’m American. Every language has a standard version, that the educated people speak, and a non-standard versions that mark you as uneducated and foolish that are not socially acceptable in professional work.
And part of becoming educated is learning to stamp out your ways of talking/writing you were brought up with and learn to conform to the standardized version of you language and the correct pronunciation of words and use of grammar. Separable verbs are not allowed in proper English, and even saying things like ‘call up’ are hokey and provincial sounding compared to simply saying ‘call’ or ‘phone’.
CombatWombat@feddit.online 1 week ago
I find this view surprising from an American. I find the use of the education system to enforce a “standard” dialect of English rather than studying and celebrating regional dialect at odds with both the project of America and our national character.
forestbeasts@pawb.social 1 week ago
Wow, this is ridiculously prescriptivist.
Also, huh? put on, take off, take out, pull over, there’s plenty of separable verbs that are perfectly normal in formal use.
Also also, as one of those “educated” people, dialect differences are cool actually and “stamping them out” should not be a goal.
– Frost
Zwuzelmaus@feddit.org 6 days 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?
bigbangdangler@reddthat.com 1 week 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 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.
Something similar occurs without phrasal verbs but with indirect objects optionally expressed as prepositional phrases:
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.
CombatWombat@feddit.online 1 week 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.
bigbangdangler@reddthat.com 1 week ago
Yeah, I’m not sure it’s entirely relevant to the existing conversation, but maybe at least in part.
I don’t have anything to cite directly in front of me for other examples from non-English languages, but I know some work exists out there, particularly in cognitive linguistics. If I remember right, some papers under the “construction grammar” umbrella touch on this in an effort to explain relative preferences between what would otherwise be equally weighted constructions. Also look into works by Dryer and Haspelmath (together and separately) for similar discussion with a more typological bent.
German does have one typological distinction which might also play a role in how permissive it is with seperable prefixes: the verb-second constraint, which basically exists in the Germanic branch of Indo-European and only a handful of languages elsewhere. This is why German allows basic clauses which are SVO (e.g. Der Hund frisst den Fleisch), but as soon as there is an auxiliary verb, it looks more like an SOV hybrid with the main verb at the end (der Hund wird den Fleisch fressen), or fully SOV if a subordinate of a matrix clause (Wir glauben, dass der Hund den Fleisch fressen wird).
That doesn’t really explain why you have to do ich sage ab instead of the ungrammatical *ich absage, but having to move that ab to the end is at least reminiscent of having to move verbs in the same way. I don’t think there’s even an alternative, so extremely long examples persist by necessity.