Analyse aspectuelle des phrasal verbs : une étude sur corpus
Analysis of Aspect of Phrasal Verbs: A Study of Corpus

Summary/Abstract: Typical of the English language, phrasal verbs have aroused intense linguistic interest and a large body of research has been carried out on them, ranging from theoretical research on their syntactic and semantic properties, as well as their diachronic study up to various fields of applied linguistics, such as in first and second language acquisition in particular. If the study and classification of phrasal verbs means venturing on a slippery ground, given their non-consensual definition and divergent theories on their semantic compositionality, phrasal verbs have traditionally been subdivided into three semantic categories: literal (e.g., take away), aspectual (e.g., eat up), and idiomatic (e.g., figure out) (see Spasov 1966, Bolinger 1971, Fraser 1976, Quirk et al. 1985, Celce-Murcia & Larsen-Freeman 1999). However, the present study is limited exclusively to the analysis of aspectual verb-particle constructions in which the particle assumes the role of aspect or Aktionsart marker in the sense of the lexical aspect of the verb. Indeed, aspectual particles provide information about the lexical aspect or Aktionsart of the verbal event (Dehé et al. 2002). This article first proposes to revisit previous studies devoted to aspectual phrasal verbs (Kennedy 1920, Poutsma 1926, Live 1965, Brinton 1985, 1988, Celce-Murcia & Larsen-Freeman 1999, Giddings 2001, Cappelle 2005, Cappelle & Chauvin 2010). Secondly, it brings a fresh perspective to aspectual phrasal verbs from a semantic point of view. More specifically, it will be a question of accounting for the semantic contribution of the adverbial particle within aspectual verb-particle constructions. In this work, we focus on the aspectual interpretations of phrasal verbs and draw up a typology examining the four semantic subclasses of aspectual phrasal verbs - namely, ingressive aspect, continuative aspect, iterative aspect, and completive aspect. This study is based on examples from the British National Corpus (Davies 2004-) and the Corpus of Contemporary American English (Davies 2008-).

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