Phrasal verbs in Early Modern English spoken language: a colloquialization conspiracy?

Abstract

Phrasal verbs (e.g. fade away, give up) tend to be associated with spoken, colloquial registers, not only in Present-day English, but also in previous stages of the language. This view has recently been challenged by Thim's (2006a, 2012) 'colloquialization conspiracy', according to which the idea that phrasal verbs are colloquial is based on a misconception which first arose in the eighteenth century. In the current study we seek to verify Thim's claim by exploring phrasal verbs in A Corpus of English Dialogues 1560-1760, a 1.2-million-word corpus of Early Modern English (EModE) speech-related text types. Based on a sample of over 7,000 examples, we demonstrate that the linguistic features, distribution and high productivity of phrasal verbs in the EModE period point towards a full entrenchment of these combinations in the spoken language, which leads us to the conclusion that the colloquial status of phrasal verbs in EModE is not merely a matter of a 'colloquialization conspiracy'.