# Languages with Prepositional Verbs



## Meyer Wolfsheim

Hello everyone,
                     In English, unlike many other languages, most verbs are not coded for their motion and rather indicate a general action which needs to be specified by using a verb+preposition and from which a single verb many different ones are derived.  

ex: to go (locomote to a location, move)
to go up (locomote in a vertical direction above)
to go down (locomote in a vertical direction below)
to go through (locomote physically/mentally an object/plight)
to go off (of) (locomote opposite the direction of an object, away)
to go away (leave and not return, indefinite period of time)

Yet, English verbs do not simply end with having a large pool of prepositions to change their meaning, some preposition verb combinations can take on several meanings depending on where the preposition is placed.  

ex: to see through

We need to see this through (we need to last/endure this)

We see right through this (we realize that something is a scam/false, we are not fooled)

I'll see through it.  (I won't be fooled or I will physically see through something)

I'll see it through.  (I'll last it out/bear it)

Does this phenomena occur in any other English verbs where the placement of the preposition radically changes diction/does this occur in other languages with similar constructions (like in German)?


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## Namakemono

In German, some verbs have inseparable preffixes and prepositions. The preffixes can't exist without a verb (ver-, emp-, ent-...), but the ones with prepositions may have a separable equivalent with an entirely different meaning. For example:
Ich setze es über -> I carry it to the other shore
Ich übersetze es -> I translate it

I don't think there's anything of the sort in Romance languages. Prepositions in our languages just aren't as flexible as in Germanic languages.


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## Meyer Wolfsheim

Namakemono said:


> In German, some verbs have inseparable preffixes and prepositions. The preffixes can't exist without a verb (ver-, emp-, ent-...), but the ones with prepositions may have a separable equivalent with an entirely different meaning. For example:
> Ich setze es über -> I carry it to the other shore
> Ich übersetze es -> I translate it
> 
> I don't think there's anything of the sort in Romance languages. Prepositions in our languages just aren't as flexible as in Germanic languages.


 
However we have such verbs in English like the übersetzen vs setzen über.  

ex: to overcome vs to come over.  

I overcame the crisis.  

I came over his house.  

Verbs with inseperable prefixes do not count; I mean having a verb with a prepositional attachment have its meaning changed due to where the preposition is placed in a sentence, as if in German, like English, you could do this:

Ich setze es über vs Ich setze über es (which I know the second one is probably wrong and doesn't mean anything different from the first other than a misplaced preposition, but if moving the preposition would create a new meaning, like in my example of to see through).


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## entangledbank

English is an extreme case of using prepositions to change meaning completely in idiomatic ways. It is probably the most difficult feature of English. I have never read of any other language that does it in a very similar way - the German separable verbs are somewhat similar, as is the general Indo-European habit of incorporating prepositions in verbs. (Think of all the English verbs that begin with Latin _in-, con-, sub-, ex-_ etc.)


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## Meyer Wolfsheim

entangledbank said:


> English is an extreme case of using prepositions to change meaning completely in idiomatic ways. It is probably the most difficult feature of English. I have never read of any other language that does it in a very similar way - the German separable verbs are somewhat similar, as is the general Indo-European habit of incorporating prepositions in verbs. (Think of all the English verbs that begin with Latin _in-, con-, sub-, ex-_ etc.)


 

So, German has no equivalent to the two uses of 'to see through' via the simple placement of the preposition? German would have to use a separate verb for to see through in the sense of lasting something out and to see through in the sense of either physically doing so or realize a falseness?

And there thus exist no prepositional/phrasal verbs in German where the placement of the prepositional part changes the phrase?


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## sokol

Meyer Wolfsheim said:


> So, German has no equivalent to the two uses of 'to see through' via the simple placement of the preposition? German would have to use a separate verb for to see through in the sense of lasting something out and to see through in the sense of either physically doing so or realize a falseness?



Well, lets take "durchschauen" in German; here's what you could express with this verb:

(inseparable, accent on "schau"):
Ich *durchschaue *dich! (I see right through you, you won't fool me - I know that you're lying.)

Ich *durchschaue *die Regeln nicht. (I don't get the rules of this game.)

(separable, accent on "durch"):
Ich *schaue durch* das Fernrohr. Ich habe *durchgeschaut. *(I am looking through the telescope, physically; plus a sentence in perfect tense to demonstrate that this is one verb indeed.)

So in German the physical act is described by a separable verb and the figurative meaning (which differs in meaning from the English one) with an inseparable verb.
But this isn't a general rule (that is - never thought of that, but I don't think it is ), use is lexicalised; and there are plenty of verbs in German (separable and inseparable) which change meaning significantly according to use.


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## Encolpius

In Hungarian verbs have separable prefixes. Some prefixes can exist without the verb just like in English, they are adverbial prefixes or what's their name. 

to go = menni
to go out = kimenni
Go out. = Menj ki!
Don't go out. = Ne menj ki!

In Slavic languages prefixes are always inseparable.


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## Kanes

Encolpius said:


> In Slavic languages prefixes are always inseparable.



Many prefixes in Slavic languages are just words like in, on, from, for, through.., that get attached to the verb to indicate location, stage of action, completeness...


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## Meyer Wolfsheim

Encolpius said:


> In Hungarian verbs have separable prefixes. Some prefixes can exist without the verb just like in English, they are adverbial prefixes or what's their name.
> 
> to go = menni
> to go out = kimenni
> Go out. = Menj ki!
> Don't go out. = Ne menj ki!
> 
> In Slavic languages prefixes are always inseparable.


 
However, I am not just talking about the function of prepositional verbs/phrasal verbs, but rather the fact that an English prepositional verb can change its meaning simply by placing its preposition in a different location in the sentence.  I've read some stuff on phrasal verbs and how a verb is one if you can place a noun in between the preposition and the verb (to look something up vs to look up something) but here "to see through" has two idiomatic meanings decided only upon the placement of the preposition "through".  If "through" is placed after the noun, then it means to last something out, but if "through" is placed before the noun, it means to realize a falseness/not be fooled.  I want to know if any language which has a similar structure of verbs also has this phenomena, or is this entirely unique to English (preferably Germanic languages)?

To clear this up, assume we have a verb X with a preposition Y and its target noun Z.  

In English, we can possibly form two meanings via the placement of Y:

X Y Z=first meaning

X Z Y=second meaning

In both cases, word order is used to create the entiely new meanings, but no changes are made to the verb, the preposition is merely separated at a different part in the sentence.  I am not talking about verbs like YX and X Y, like "overcome" vs "to come over."  Sorry for any confusion I created, I hope this makes my question clearer.


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## CapnPrep

Meyer Wolfsheim said:


> However, I am not just talking about the function of prepositional verbs/phrasal verbs, but rather the fact that an English prepositional verb can change its meaning simply by placing its preposition in a different location in the sentence.


Your examples _are_ based on the distinction between phrasal verbs and prepositional verbs. Only one of your sentences contains a prepositional verb: _*see* _[_through sth_]. In the other case, you have the phrasal verb _*see* _[_sth_] *through*. It's not the same verb, so it's not surprising that the meanings are so divergent.

This is made possible by the fact that English has phrasal verbs, and that some phrasal verb particles look exactly like prepositions. I don't know of any languages outside of Germanic with this particular combination of properties, but there probably are some.

What makes English different from German is that you can also find examples where a single word order has two different meanings, again corresponding to a structural distinction between phrasal verbs and prepositional verbs: _I pointed out the window_, _I ran over the giant_, _I looked up her skirt_. There could be similar examples in Dutch (but with the particle/preposition at the end).


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## palomnik

As the captain points out, you mustn't confuse phrasal verbs (_see it through_) with prepositional verbs (_see through it_).  The second element in a phrasal verb compound is an adverb, although you can get an argument over that.

Kanes points out that Slavic languages do this too; in fact, they add inseparable prefixes to verbs, and there is a good deal of additional grammatical baggage added regarding aspect.  Aspect can play a part in English phrasal verbs as well, viz., the distinction between _sit! _and _sit down!_ implies an aspectual distinction that a Russian speaker would understand.

Chinese and Thai have similar constructions with prepositional and adverbial particles too, but the distinction in grammatical structure between these languages and most European languages makes a direct comparison difficult.


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## Meyer Wolfsheim

So a verb being phrasal has nothing to do with it being an idiomatic expression?, because to see something through and to see through something (realize a falseness) are both very idiomatic.  In both of them, the preposition 'through' really has no meaning to either enduring something or realizing a falseness and their meanings can only be figured out from a non-native speaker if they are told it/have learned it.


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## arsham

Persian also uses a set of separable prefixes. In addition, some verbs have different meanings when used with different prepositions.

اندیشیدن به  andishidan be to think of/about some thing
اندیشیدن از andishidan az  to be afraid of, to apprehend

پرداختن به  pardaaxtan be to take care of, to deal with
پرداختن از  pardaaxtan az to empty

There are also phrasal verbs, in which a nominal group is linked to a verb through a preposition,

به جای آوردن  (literally to bring to place) to execute, to implement
از دست دادن   (lit. to give from hand) to lose


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## ThomasK

I would like to know how many languages have this 'principle' of phrasal verbs. But I think it is that specific that I'll put it in a separate thread.


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## Outsider

I've read that North Germanic languages have phrasal verbs. It would be nice to hear from posters who are familiar with them...


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## koniecswiata

The English phrasal verbs do coinside to some degree with slavic verbs that have a prefix + verb root construction.  Notice some phrasal verbs like "eat up" or "think through" they actually do have a "completive aspect".  If I am not mistaken, Old English created the future this way (one of the ways).  Eat was present, and eat up would have been future.  This would correspond to the "Slavic way" completely.  Probably there is something IndoEuropean going on here.  Notice that Latin also used prefixes to create more verbs from root forms in a very productive way.


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## clevermizo

I think the real question here is as others have been pointing out, what other languages have phrasal verbs specifically, not so much idiomatic usages of prepositions. Many languages use prepositional phrases as verbal arguments and the use of the preposition or of a different preposition changes the idiomatic meaning. For example, in Spanish, dejar de hacer algo means "to quit doing something" while "dejar que lo haga" means "allow him to do it". In Arabic ʔaṭlaqa-hu أطلقه means _he set it free_ (no preposition), while ʔaṭlaqa ʕalay-hi أطلق عليه means _he shot at it_ (with the preposition ʕalā). These phenomena are analogous to English verbs with prepositional complements, with special idiomatic meanings.

However, neither Spanish nor Arabic has constructions like "I saw it through" where the verb is actually "to see through" not just "to see", or "I told him off" where the verb is "to tell off".


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## sound shift

Outsider said:


> I've read that North Germanic languages have phrasal verbs. It would be nice to hear from posters who are familiar with them...


I don't speak any of the North Germanic languages, but I note that R.J. McClean's "Teach Yourself Swedish" employs the term "Compound Verbs" and includes as an example the sentence _Han sökte upp mig_, which means "He looked me up (came to see me)".


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## Ben Jamin

Encolpius said:


> In Hungarian verbs have separable prefixes. Some prefixes can exist without the verb just like in English, they are adverbial prefixes or what's their name.
> 
> to go = menni
> to go out = kimenni
> Go out. = Menj ki!
> Don't go out. = Ne menj ki!
> 
> In Slavic languages prefixes are always inseparable.


The prefixes in Slavic languages (at least in the ones I know best, ie Polish and Russian) are inseparable indeed. But that is not the whole story. The prefixes are used to create a great abundance of verbs with meaning being very different from both the core verb and the preposition. For instance 'bić' in Polish means 'to beat', 'za' means behind, but 'zabić' means to kill. The preposition takes on a new role, that of an abstarct prefix indicating that the action has been *con*cluded (something like 'con' in Latin). Most of the new verbs created that way has a meaning that is rather impossible to guess from the meaning of the prepositional prefix. For instance 'nadpić' ('nad' means 'over') means to drink a very little amount of a liquid from a cup or a glass (with the receptacle being usually completely full).


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## ThomasK

That is  quite an interesting observation! When I compare with Dutch, it is the case to some extent as well, but I'd need to be able to collect those inseparable verbs first. I can see some cases that illustrate your point:
- _ondernemen_ (under-take), enterprise/entrepreneurial action : no clear link
- _onderzoeken_ (under-search), simply research: no clear link with 'under'
- _ondertekenen_ (under-sign): clearer (you generally sign below)
- _overleden_ (overlive), survive 
One source points out that the _mis_-prefix (wrong) in Dutch has a different meaning, depending on whether the verb is separable or not: in separable V the meaning is more literal (missing as opposed to hitting), in inseparable V it is less, more general (wrong, rather). The inseparable V are also fewer. 

What I thought is (for a second): maybe they were separable, but as soon as they were no longer analysed (by us and our ancestors as the sum of two entities), they stuck together and were no longer separated. 

(Thanks for the observation, Ben Jamin !)


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## bo-marco

In Emiliano (a Romance language spoken in north of Italy, region of Emilia) there are a lot of prepositional verbs.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emiliano-Romagnolo

An uncommon feature for a Romance language is the extensive use of  idiomatic phrasal verbs (verb-particle constructions) much in the same  way as in English and other Germanic languages. 
Examples: _dèr so_ (lit. give up,  same as in English); _fèr so_ (lit. do up,  meaning: to tidy up); _dèr zå_ (lit. give down, meaning: to brush  or to beat); _mètter vî_ (lit. to put away, meaning: to lock); _dîr  so_ (lit. to tell up, meaning: to call up); _dèr vî_ (lit. to  give away, same as in English); _èser dré_ (action in progress, a  form of gerund:  _A san dré ch'a fag_ - _I'm doing_); _avair dré_ (to  have with yourself: _A i ò dré di sold_ - _I have money with me_).


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