The Logic of Phrasal Verbs: Classes for Developing Your Intuition for the Most Idiomatic Part of English

Student: Wait, what? There’s a logic to phrasal verbs!?

Teacher: Yip.

S: But why does every other teacher say there isn’t?

T: Because they haven’t read the cognitive linguists who have studied how the meanings of prepositions and adverbs reflect human psychological experience of the world, and how phrasal verbs are simply metaphorical extensions of those meanings.

S: Why don’t coursebooks talk about this logic?

T: They will soon. Language teaching is a different academic field from cognitive linguistics; it takes a while for one academic field to take in ideas from another.

S: You talk about the logic of phrasal verb, but in the title you also talk about intuition. How do those two things go together?

T: The logic of phrasal verbs is not rule-based logic like we find with grammar tenses, it’s a little different.

S: Different how?

T: The logic of a phrasal verb is a product of the essential meaning of the preposition or adverb combining with one of the meanings of the verb, sometimes with a metaphorical or imagistic twist thrown in for good measure.

S: Sounds complicated.

T: Sure, the explanation does, but the practice of it is simple. All you have to do is combine the images that the essential meaning of the preposition or adverb conjures up with the images the verb conjures up and voilà, you have the meaning.

S: Give me an example.

T: Ok, take the sentence “He stormed out of the room”. Now combine the images that the words “He”, “storm”, “out” and “room” conjure up.

S: Ok.

T: You’re probably seeing someone leaving a room violently, maybe slamming the door, something like that?

S: Ya, more or less.

T: That’s the meaning.

S: Wow, that’s poetic. But my level of English is fine for most situations. I’m not sure if I need this.

T: You don't if you’re content to never speak English as naturally as Northern Europeans do.

S: What’s different about them?

T: Their native languages have phrasal verbs, and so their intuition for using prepositions and adverbs in this way simply transfers across from those language to English. They don’t have to think about it. Indeed, if you ask most of them what a phrasal verb is, they couldn’t even tell you.

S: Wow, so that's why they have such an advantage with English.

T: Now you can too.