À propos du Phrasal Verb en espagnol et en allemand

Abstract

English phrasal verbs are syntactically defined as the union of a verb and an adverb (or preposition) which follows it immediately (give up) or may be separated by an inserted complement (take your shoes off). The presence of the second element does not depend on a general rule, but is lexically restricted, and since it does not have an autonomous function in the sentence, it is traditionally considered as a "particle" of the verb. These constructions have an important similarity with the Italian "syntagmatic verbs", which also exist in Spanish, and with the German "separable verbs", because they fulfill basically the same functional features. On the other hand, this property also justifies these verbs to be included within the phraseological units, because they usually present an important degree of fixedness and idiomaticity. Our contrastive study focuses on Spanish and German, and is completed with some semantic observations obtained with quantitative methods and corpus linguistics tools, taking into account their polysemy and diatopic variation.