| A phrasal verb is a verb that consists of a verb followed by one or two particles and that functions as a single unit both lexically and syntactically. This paper aims to find out not only the rule of the formation of a phrasal verb, but also the conditions of coexistiting of a phrasal verb and its arguments on a semantic level.In this paper, the author selects317phrasal verbs, which are formed by38verbs, mentioned in Collins Cobuild:Essential English Dictionary(1988), and12particles, mentioned by Marion Elenbaas (2007), from Longman Phrasal Verbs Dictionary and Oxford Advanced Learner’s English-Chinese Dictionary. First, analyze and extract the semantic features of verbs and particles through the approach of componential analysis. Then, classify and summarize the main coexisting types of of verbs and particles according their semantic components. Finally, the author finds out the rules of the formation of a phrasal verb, as follow:1. If the verb and the particle only contain complementary semantic component, they can form a non-idiomatic two-word phrasal word.2. If the verb and the particle contain at least one pair of the same semantic component, they can form a idiomatic two-word phrasal word.3. If a verb and particles contain at least one pair of the same or complementary semantic component, and the two particles must contain at least one same component, they can form a idiomatic three-word phrase verb.Besides, in order to find out the semantic conditions of the coexistiting of a phrasal verb and its arguments, this paper, first, analyze the the semantic conditions of the the coexisting of its external argument and its internal argument. At last, the author figures out the semantic condition are that the phrasal verb must have the same component with its arguments, and the external and internal arguments also must contain related components. |
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