Lexicology in theory, practice and tests Study guide Recommended by the Academic Council of Sumy State University Sumy Sumy State University 2015

It should be mentioned that the notion of word-formation excludes semantic word-building as well as shortening, sound- and stress-interchange which traditionally are referred to minor ways of word-formation.

In the process of communication words and word-groups can be shortened. The causes of shortening can be linguistic and extra-linguistic. By extra-linguistic causes changes in the life of people are meant. In Modern English a lot of new acronyms, abbreviations, blends, initials are formed because the pace of life is increasing and it becomes necessary to give more and more information for the shortest period of time. There are also linguistic causes of abbreviating words and word-groups, such as the demand of rhythm, which is satisfied in English by monosyllabic words. Borrowings from other languages became shortened after assimilation in English. Here there is modification of form on the basis of analogy, e. g. the Latin borrowing fanaticus is shortened to fan on the analogy with native words: man, pan, tan etc.

The process of shortening lies in clipping a part of word; the result is a new lexical unit. But this process goes beyond words; many word-groups also become shortened in the process of communication. Therefore, the term “shortening of words” is to be considered as conventional, as it involves the shortening of both words and word-groups. There are two different ways of shortening: contraction (clipping) and abbreviation (initial shortening) (see Table 6).

According to the first a new word is made from a syllable of the original word. Clipping is shortening or reducing long words. This is a common phenomon in English which can be proved by the following examples: information is clipped to info, advertisement to advert or ad, influenza to flu, telephone to phone. The classification of clipping:

1. 
   Final clipping (apocope). The omitting of the final part of the word: doc (doctor), mag (magazine), Nick (Nickolas).
   
2. 
   Initial clipping (apheresis). The omitting of the fore part of the word. plane (airplane), van (caravan), phone (telephone).
   
3. 
   Medial clipping (syncope). The omitting of the middle part of the word: fancy (fantasy), specs (spectacles), maths (mathematics).
   
4. 
   Mixed clipping, where the fore and the final parts of the words are clipped: flu (influenza), tec (detective), fridge (refrigerator).
   

Abbreviations are subdivided into five groups:

1. 
   Acronyms which are read in accordance within the reading rules as though they were ordinary words: NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organization), UNO (United Nations Organization).
   
2. 
   Alphabetic abbreviations in which letters get their full alphabetic pronunciation and a full stress: USA, BBC, MP. Alphabetic abbreviations sometimes concern names of famous people: G.B.S. (George Bernard Shaw), B.B. (Brigitte Bardot).
   
3. 
   Compound abbreviations in which the first constituent is a letter and the second part is a complete word: A-bomb (atomic-bomb), L-driver (learner – driver). In compound abbreviation also may be clipped one or both constituents: Interpol (international police).
   
4. 
   Graphic abbreviations which can be found in texts for economy of space. They are pronounced as the corresponding unabbreviated words: Mr., Mrs., m (mile), ltd (limited). There are several semantic groups of graphic abbreviations: a) days of the week, e. g. Mon – Monday, Tue – Tuesday, etc. b) names of months, e. g. Apr – April, Aug – August, etc. c) names of counties in UK, e. g. Yorks – Yorkshire, Berks –Berkshire, etc. d) names of states in USA, e. g. Ala – Alabama, Alas – Alaska, etc. e) names of address, e. g. Mr., Mrs., Ms., Dr., etc. f) military ranks, e. g. capt. –captain, col. – colonel, sgt – sergeant, etc. g) scientific degrees, e. g. B.A. – Bachelor of Arts, D.M. – Doctor of Medicine. (Sometimes in scientific degrees we have abbreviations of Latin origin, e. g., M.B. – Medicinae Baccalaurus), h) units of time, length, weight, e. g. f/ft –foot/feet, sec. – second, in. – inch, mg. – milligram, etc. The reading of some graphical abbreviations depends on the context, e. g. “m” can be read as: male, married, masculine, metre, mile, million, minute, “l.p.” can be read as long-playing, low pressure.
   
5. 
   Latin abbreviations can be read as separate letters or be substituted by the English equivalents: e. g. (for example), cf. (compare), i. e. (that is).
   

contraction (clipping)

abbreviation (initial shortening)

final clipping (apocope):

initial clipping (apheresis): e. g. plane (airplane), phone (telephone)

medial clipping (syncope):

e. g. fancy (fantasy), specs (spectacles)

mixed clipping:

acronyms:

alphabetic abbreviations:

graphic abbreviations:

compound abbreviations:

latin abbreviations:

Don’t confuse shortening of words in written speech and in the sphere of oral intercourse. Shortening of words in written speech results in graphical abbreviations which are, in fact, signs representing words and word-groups of high frequency of occurrence in various manifestations of human activity.

The meaning remains unchanged after shortening. As a result it produces words belonging to the same part of speech as original words. For the most part nouns are influenced by shortening, e. g. prof is a noun and professor is also a noun. Mostly we can find a shortened word in the vocabulary together with the longer word from which it is derived and usually has the same lexical meaning differing only in emotive charge and stylistic reference.

Sometimes shortening affects the spelling of the word, e. g. “c” can be substituted by “k” before “e” to preserve pronunciation, e. g. mike (microphone), Coke (coca-cola) etc. The same rule is observed in the following cases: fax (facsimile), teck (technical college), trank (tranquilizer) etc. The final consonants in the shortened forms are substituted by letters characteristic of native English words.

1. A small light-emitting diode display activated near the base of the trap. 2. My money order was, and still is, to just have a normal life. 3. The creative director was a nice guy. 4. In five years, all you’ll see are these babies – High Speed Civil Transport. 5. What does Large Hadrons Collider stand for?’ Langdon asked, trying not to sound nervous. 6. ‘They canceled the Superconducting Super Collider. 7. Ask yourself why the United States Christian Coalition is the most influential lobby against scientific progress in the world. 8. Isn’t antimatter what fuels the United States Ship Enterprise. 9. A kiloton was equal to 1,000 metric tons of trinitrotoluene. 10. And yet the room bristled with high-tech gear – banks of computers, faxes, electronic maps of the Vatican complex, and televisions turned to Cable News Network 11. Your cameras don’t have Global Positioning System locators on them? 12. The British Broadcasting Corporation run a preliminary story yesterday to mediocre response. 13. ‘That’s the zeta particle’, she said, pointing to a faint track that was almost invisible. 14. His paper. His phone. His electronic mail. 15. The voice on the line was raspy, with a Middle-East accent. 16. Diagramma number one. Diagramma number one. Diagramma number one. All scientific. All conversion. 17. Langdon buttoned his tweed jacket against the cold. I’m in Australia, he thought. 18. Perhaps you forget, miss Vetra, as soon as I report your father’s murder, there will be an investigation of CERN. 19. Langdon had never seen Saint Peter’s from the air. 20. Why wasn’t I trying to do something more easy for markets to digest id est, cutie-pie greeting cards or whatever. 21. Some to do with business, some to do with art, et cetera. 22. Worrying about “Commercial versus Artistic” is a complete waste of time. 23. He squinted at his digital clock. It was 5.18 ante meridiem.

Reduplication is a morphological process that involves the repetition of all or part of a word. These parts of words are referred to as roots or stems. In full reduplication, the entire word is repeated without any phonetic changes, for example, ‘So I would say that he and Mr DeLay are friends, but not friends-friends, if you will’. This group of reduplicated compounds is called reduplicative compounds proper. Their constituents are identical in their form.

The second type is called gradational or partial reduplication. Only a segment is duplicated in partial reduplication. Slang words such as super-duper and razzle-dazzle express extra meaning using partial reduplication. This is identified as partial because the -s from super becomes a -d, and the -r from razzle also becomes a -d, meaning that the whole segment is not copied. The segment that is duplicated may occur at either the beginning or the end of the word. Also we can come across a variation of the root vowel or consonant, e. g. This shilly-shallying with the question is absurd. This type of word building is greatly simplified in modern English by the vast number of monosyllables: chit-chat, riff-raff, etc. Also one should distinguish rhyme compounds. Here the constituents are joined to rhyme, e. g. Ronaldinho beats holie-goalie and ball falls into the net behind Poland’s devastated goalkeeper. Morphological processes change the stem of a word in order to adjust its meaning for communicative purposes. Stylistically speaking, most words made by reduplication represent informal groups such as slang and colloquialisms. Some languages use the process largely, some moderately, and some not at all.
Exercise 14. Pick out reduplicative compounds, comment on their constituent parts.

1. ‘Uh, no worries. I can handle the Oz Full Monty. I mean, not handle-candle, like ‘hands to flesh’ handle’. 2. The first rule of project Mayhem: Don’t ask questions about Project Mayhem. ‘Yeah-Yeah’, he nodded. 3. No, I mean... Do you like him or do you like-him-like-him? 4. Well, between witch work and work-work, I just don't have any time any more. 5. Is he like a businessman-businessman? Or is this like when I used to sell lemonade and call myself a businessman? 6. Although Luke did this awesome dive off the high board, which wasn’t really a dive-dive, it was more like Will Farrell falling out of a plane. 7. There’s a guy who collects fans. These are not sports fans but fans-fans. 8. “I didn’t mean go-somewhere-go-somewhere”, I said, remembering that he surely thought I made a mistake, and after all, last time the two of us had been alone we’d been all over each other. 9. Ronaldinho’s goal-goal falls into the net behind England’s devastated goalkeeper. 10. She either died or divorced you, so it was a fifty-fifty guess. 11. We kept chasing him, all the way to the end of the block, then into a sort of never-never land where there were a lot of railroad tracks. 12. Mr. Sloane murmured something close to her ear. 13. Burke launched into British social chitchat. 14. He didn’t like me calling him ‘sir’ – we were supposed to be buddy-buddies. 15. The other chair was occupied by a lovely creature, a really tip-top Ambrose McEvoy. 16. Already his name was whispered in connection with the All England ping-pong championship. 17. My cold desire is to hear the boom-boom of your heart. 18. I worry a lot about the bling-bling materialism, the rabid consumerism, that pervades many of our inner-city areas. 19. Last point: going topless on the rampage is an absolute no-no. 20. I think that we will be waving bye bye to them. 21. Frankly speaking I don’t like her new dress, it’s so-so. 22. He was asked to minimize chit-chat and keep the troops moving. 23. The report is just a lot of corporate flim-flam. 24. But there's really not much time to dilly-dally on the feet. 25. That's fiddle-faddle! 26. Dad's smile was giving Johnny the heebie-jeebies , but he was in too deep to care. 27. You could have approached us without all the hocus-pocus, couldn't you? 28. Dropping out and all the mysticism was really mumbo-jumbo. 29. He tells me he can't be bothered with all that "lovey-dovey" stuff. 30. The little car, driven pell-mell across the fields, pulled up to a stop where the narrow trail up the slope began. 31. He says: "We don't want thousands of people wandering around here, willy-nilly. 32. Chicago slips effortlessly from stage to screen without losing any of its original razzle-dazzle.

Both sound- and stress-interchange may be considered as ways of forming words only diachronically, because in Modern English not a single word can be coined by changing the root-vowel of a word or by shifting the place of the stress. Sound-interchange as well as stress-interchange indeed has turned into means of distinguishing primarily between words of different parts of speech and as such is rather wide-spread in Modern English, e. g. to sing – song, to live – life, strong – strength, etc. It also distinguishes between different word-forms, e. g. man – men, wife – wives, to know – knew, to leave – left, etc.

Sound interchange was productive in Old English and can occur in other Indo-European languages. The causes of sound interchange can be different. It can be the consequence of Ancient Ablaut which cannot be explained by the phonetic laws during the period of the language development known to scientists, e. g. to strike – stroke, to sing – song, etc. It can be also the result of Ancient Umlaut or vowel mutation which comes from palatalizing the root vowel because of the front vowel in the syllable following the root (regressive assimilation), e. g. hot – to heat (hotian), blood – to bleed (blodian), etc.

Sound-interchange is divided into two groups: vowel-interchange and consonant-interchange. With the help of vowel-interchange we differentiate parts of speech, e. g. full – to fill, food – to feed, blood – to bleed, etc. In some cases vowel-interchange is connected with affixation, e. g. long – length, strong – strength, etc. Intransitive verbs and the corresponding transitive ones with a causative meaning also display vowel-interchange, e. g. to rise – to raise, to sit – to set, to lie – to lay, to fall – to fell.

The type of consonant-interchange typical of Modern English is the interchange of a voiceless fricative consonant in a noun and the corresponding voiced consonant in the corresponding verb, e. g. use – to use, mouth – to mouth, house – to house, advice – to advise, etc.

There are some particular cases of consonant-interchange: [k] – [t∫]: to speak – speech, to break – breach; [s] – [d]: defence – to defend; offence – to offend; [s] – [t]: evidence – evident, importance – important, etc. Consonant-interchange may be connected with vowel-interchange, e. g. bath – to bathe, breath – to breathe, life – to live, etc.

Stress interchange can be mainly met in verbs and nouns of Romanic origin: nouns have the stress on the first syllable and verbs on the last syllable, e. g. `accent – to ac`cent. This phenomenon is explained in such way: French verbs and nouns had different structure when they were borrowed into English; verbs had one syllable more than the corresponding nouns. When these borrowings were assimilated in English the stress in them was shifted to the previous syllable (the second from the end). Later on the last unstressed syllable in verbs borrowed from French was dropped (the same as in native verbs) and after that the stress in verbs was on the last syllable while in nouns it was on the first syllable. Therefore we have such pairs in English as: to af`fix –`affix, to con`flict – `conflict, to ex`port –`export, to im`port – `import, to ex`tract – `extract, to con`duct – `conduct, to pre`sent – `present, to con`trast – `contrast, to in`crease – `increase, etc. Because of stress interchange we have also vowel interchange in such words because vowels are pronounced differently in stressed and unstressed positions.
Exercise 15. Give pairs corresponding to the following nouns, verbs and adjectives.

Abide, absent, abstract, accent, advice, attribute, bathe, believe, bite, blood, breathe, breed, broad, calve, choose, clothe, conduct, contest, contrast, deep, devise, excuse, export, feed, fill, foot, frequent, gild, glaze, halve, increase, house, knit, live, loose, lose, practise, present, prove, record, relieve, serve, speak, strike, strong, use, wide, worthy, wreathe.

Onomatopoeia (sound-imitation, echoism) is the notion that implicates an action or a thing by a more or less exact reproduction of a natural sound associated with it (babble, crow, twitter). Words coined by this interesting type of word-building are made by imitating different kinds of sounds that may be produced by animals, birds, insects, human beings and inanimate objects. It is of some interest that sounds produced by the same kind of animal are. They are often represented by quite different sound groups in different languages. For example, English dogs bark (cf. the Ukr. гавкати) or howl (cf. the Ukr. вити). The English cock cries cock-a-doodle-doo (cf. the Ukr. ку-ка-рі-ку). In England ducks quack and frogs croak cf. the Ukr. крякати said about ducks and квакати said about frogs). It is only English and Ukrainian cats who seem capable of mutual understanding when they meet, for English cats mew or miaow (meow). The same can be said about cows: they moo (but also low).

Some names of animals and especially of birds and insects are also produced by sound-imitation: crow, cuckoo, humming-bird, whip-poor-will, cricket.

There are some semantic groups of words formed with the aid of sound imitation a) sounds produced by human beings, such as: to whisper, to giggle, to mumble, to sneeze, to whistle, etc. b) sounds produced by animals, birds, insects, such as: to hiss, to buzz, to bark, to moo, to twitter, etc., c) sounds produced by nature and objects, such as: to splash, to rustle, to clatter, to bubble, to ding-dong, to tinkle, etc. The corresponding nouns are formed by means of conversion, e. g. clang (of a bell), chatter (of children), etc.

R. Southey’s poem “How Does the Water Come Down at Lodore” is a classical example of the stylistic possibilities offered by onomatopoeia: the words in it sound an echo of what the poet sees and describes.

Here it comes sparkling,

And there it flies darkling ...

Eddying and whisking,

Spouting and frisking, ...

And whizzing and hissing, ...

And guggling and struggling, ...

And bubbling and troubling and doubling,

And flapping and rapping and clapping and slapping ...

And thumping and pumping and bumping and jumping,

And dashing and flashing and splashing and clashing ...

And at once and all o'er, with a mighty uproar,

And this way the water comes down at Lodore.
Exercise 16. Pick out all sound-imitative words from the sentences given below.

1. My phone buzzed. I picked it up. 2. All about him black metal pots were boiling and bubbling on huge stoves, and kettles were hissing, and pans were sizzling, and strange iron machines were clanking and spluttering. 3. The car moved through the city, its motor humming in the warm afternoon. 4. The carriage was clapping along in Central Park, being whooshed at by passing cars. 5. Passenger liners tooted their basso horns. 6. Clap-clap came through the window. 7. Pons puffed reflectively on his pipe. 8. “Peewit”, said a peewit, very remote. 9. He could hear the cheap clock ticking on her mantelpiece. 10. The German machine-guns were tat-tat-tatting at them, and there was a ceaseless swish of bullets. 11. He tip-toed across the porch and gently opened the screen door, remembering that it screeched when yanked. 12. He said something and she giggled. 13. Should we clap our hands during worship? 14. A man had no business to giggle like that and gesticulate and make grimaces. Mopping and mowing,’ she said under her breath. 15. ‘United Metal and Mill is nothing to sneeze at.’ ‘Going to be the toughest fight yet,’ Shewchuk said. 16. If we clap after someone is baptized, have we not put the focus on the one baptized instead of God? 17. Becky Thatcher had stopped coming to School. Tom had struggled with his pride for a few days, and tried to “whistle her down the wind”, but failed. 18. Voltaire had rashly attacked the whole body of literary critics... This stirred up a hornets' nest and the hornets began to buzz. 19. So, as for Jem Wilson, she could whistle him down the wind. 20. Goldsborough girls were nothing to sneeze at. 21. Who keeps company with the wolf will learn to howl. 22. After several minutes, she issued a low hmmm. 23. He beep-beeped at the bicyclist who was trying to cross the road. 24. The clocks struck twice tick-tock… her heart was wrung. 25. “Vroom-vroom!” He started a motor of his new car. 26. It was obvious that somebody has come, Lesley ruff-ruffed at the yard. 27. What a drag he is! I hate his blah-blah-blah! 28. Do you hear it? Something is quacking in the basket. 29. I like wah-wah effect on a synthesizer, it will supplement greatly our melody. 30. The cat is meowing, I’ll feed him. 31. "You like being soothed by a murderess?" Cumberland barked at me. 32. We heard them echo in the mountains. 33. Then the clicking of an alarm clock from beyond a half open door.

Blending may be determined as formation that joins two words that include the letters or sounds they have in common as a connecting element.

A blend may be defined as a new lexeme built from two parts or two words (or possibly more words) in such a way that the constituent parts are usually easily identifiable, though in some instances, only one of the elements may be identifiable.

According to the prototype phrases with which they can be correlated two types of blends can be distinguished. The first may be named additive, the second – restrictive. Both involve the sliding together not only of sound but of meaning as well. The first, additive type, is transformable into a phrase made of the respective complete stems connected with the conjunction and, e. g. smog < smoke and fog; ‘a mixture of smoke and fog’. The elements may be synonymous, be included in the same semantic field or at least be a part of the same lexico-grammatical class of words: French+English > Frenglish. Other examples are: brunch < breakfast and lunch, transceiver < transmitter and receiver, crunch

The restrictive type is transformable into an attributive phrase where the first element serves as modifier of the second: cine (matographic pano) rama > Cinerama.
Back-Formation

In etymology, back-formation is the process of creating a new lexeme, as a rule by means of removing actual or supposed affixes. The resulting neologism is called a back-formation, a term coined by James Murray in 1889. Back-formation is a word actually formed from, but it seems to be the base of another word. Back-formation or reversion, by which we mean inferring of short word from a long one, is a source of short words in the past and an active derivative process at the present time. The examples are: to edit from editor, to beg from beggar, peddle from peddler.

It means the derivation of new words by subtracting a real or supposed affix from existing words through misinterpretation of their structure. The earliest examples of this type of word creating are the verb to beg that was made from the French borrowing beggar, to burgle from burglar, to cobble from cobbler, to peddle from peddler. In all these cases the verb was made from the noun by subtracting what was falsely associated with the English suffix -er. Latest examples of back-formation are to butle from butler, to baby-sit from baby-sitter, to blood-transfuse from blood-transfusing, to accreditate from accreditation, to bach from bachelor, to collocate from collocation, to enthuse from enthusiasm, to compute from computer, to reminisce from reminiscence, to televise from television, etc.

Back-formation differs from clipping – back-formation may change the part of speech or the word’s meaning, while clipping creates shortened words from longer words, but leaves the part of speech or the meaning of the word unchanged. For instance, the noun resurrection was borrowed from Latin, and the verb resurrect was then backformed hundreds of years later from it by removing the ion suffix. This segmentation of resurrection into resurrect + ion was possible because in English there were some examples of Latinate words in the form of verb and verb+-ion pairs, such as opine/opinion. These became the pattern for many more such pairs, where a verb derived from a Latin supine stem and a noun ending in ion entered the language together, such as insert/insertion, project/projection, emote/emotion, etc.

Back-formation may be alike the reanalyses of folk etymologies when it based on a false understanding of the morphology of the longer word. For instance, the singular noun asset is a back-formation from the plural assets. However, assets is primarily not a plural; it is a loan-word from Anglo-Norman asetz (modern French assez). The -s was reanalyzed as a plural suffix.

One of the types of back-formation is derivation of verbs from compounds that have either -er or -ing as their last element. Some examples of back-formations from compounds are the verbs beach-comb, house-break, red-bait, tape-record.

Exercise 18. Comment on the origin and structure of the words formed through back-formation and blending.

1. He spoke with a certain what-is-it in his voice, and I could see that, if not actually disgruntled, he was far from being gruntled, so I tactfully changed the subject. 2. “Mamma might wake and miss me. What are you going to burgle first?” “You’d better go upstairs”, he said, rather sulkily. 3. Boy! Don’t beg here! Don’t you known this is not allowed here. 4. Who follow up the sales of painting and burgle the houses of those who buy. 5. When Emily and Alice accept their first babysitting job, they must learn how to care for their unusual charge, a bulldog jealous of the new human baby in its household. 6. I want to talk like them, dress like them, handwrite like them, and think like them. 7. Why do you so lazy? I ask you to hard-boil some eggs. 8. The room was to air-condition, I had left the curtains open to the night sky, moonlight cast a silvery sheen over everything, bathed the room in a soft radiance. 9. This paper says how to edit technical documents. 10. Otherwise it was usual for vets to euthanase animals with a lethal injection. 11. Private practitioners may euthanize one or two animals a day at most, and some days none at all. 12. When the next one appeared I slewed out, over-steered, spun the wheel back frantically, dived over the sastruga, then over-steered again. 13. You must become familiar with the parts of the syringe and needle and proficient in handling them. 14. Her hair was kempt, her clothing shevelled, and she moved in a gainly way. 15. While we’re at it, and to save each other mail, let’s look at the humorous use of couth and kempt, wordplay on uncouth and ill-kempt. 16. Give me twenty minutes, Harry, and we’ll have brunch. 17. The company badly needed radiotrician. 18. Inside his office intercom buzzed and he pressed the talk button. 19. She begged me to say nothing to her father. 20. Certain chemicals are easily absorbed into the bloodstream, while others are not. 21. The pound is the monetary unit of Britain. 22. There was not a pretty face in sight so I sulked all the way to Dover. 23. The crowd keeps plying the speaker with questions. 24. One of the pleasures of being on holiday is the freedom to loaf around without feeling guilty. 25. The police hustled the prisoner into a cell. 26. Salt was hawked about by retail dealers. 27. Funk signifies return of modern jazzmen to earthy roughage of blues, but rephrased with modern techniques. 28. The market situation is difficult to evaluate. 29. If you expect to gain favours from the king, you will have to grovel before him to show your respect and obedience. 30. He wrote and edited a new publication. 31. Industry is often considered as a major contributor to smog. 32. More and more people are shopping on the internet. 33. Her mini computer has a 16 bit processor. 34. She got an email from her father last week. 35. The intercom announced the departure of Flight BA 531. 36. The investigative journalist recorded the voice of the corrupt leader in his camcorder. 37. A girl electrocuted herself when she got into a bath wearing electric hair curlers 38. She felt a flare of anger within her. 39. The train chugged through the chunnel as the water had drained off.
Phrasal Verbs

A phrasal verb is a verb followed by a preposition or an adverb; the combination creates a meaning different from the original verb alone, e. g.: to get = to obtain: I need to get a new battery for my camera; to get together = to meet: Why don’t we all get together for lunch one day?

Phrasal verbs are a part of a large group of verbs called “multi-part” or “multi-word” verbs. The preposition or adverb that is placed after the verb is sometimes called a particle. Phrasal verbs play an important role in English. However, they are mostly used in spoken English and informal texts. They should be avoided in academic writing where such a formal verb as “to postpone” is preferable rather than “to put off”.

Phrasal verbs are divided into transitive and intransitive. Transitive phrasal verbs always have an object, e. g. I made up an excuse. (‘Excuse’ is the object of the verb.) Intransitive phrasal verbs do not have an object, e. g.: My car broke down.

We can differentiate separable or inseparable phrasal verbs. When we deal with separable phrasal verbs, we can put the object between the verb and the preposition, e. g. I looked the word up in the dictionary. The object is placed after the preposition in inseparable ones, e. g.: I will look into the matter as soon as possible.

In some cases we can put an object in both places, compare: I picked up the book. I picked the book up. But remember if the object is a pronoun, it must be placed between the verb and the preposition, e. g.: I picked it up.

Phrasal verbs may be either non-idiomatic or idiomatic. Non-idiomatic phrasal verbs retain their primary local meaning, whereas in idiomatic phrasal verbs meanings cannot be derived from their constituent parts.
Exercise 19. Set off idiomatic and non-idiomatic phrasal verbs. Give their Ukrainian equivalents

1. How can you account for your absence at the meeting? 2. He was accused of murder. 3. He acted on the tip received from an insider and made a lot of money. 4. These figures don’t add up. 5. They agree about everything. 6. They don’t always agree on the way children should be raised. 7. He applied for the position of tour guide. 8. He arrived at the airport two hours before the flight. 9. Here I rallied, and had already improved so far as to be able to walk about the wards, and even to bask a little upon the verandah, when I was struck down by enteric fever, that curse of our Indian possessions. 10. For month my life was despaired of, and when at last I came to myself and become convalescent, I was so weak and emaciated that a medical board determined that not a day should be lost in sending me back to England. 11. I asked him to lunch with me at the Holborn, and we started off together in a hansom. 12. You mustn’t blame me if you don’t get on with him. 13. She reluctantly decided that to go on was the only thing to be done. 14. “Go on,” she cried. “You’re daft. I can never make you out.” 15. I’m thinking of giving up the shop soon. 16. Elliott called me up one morning. 17. I must be getting along. 18. I peeped out – he was putting on his hat with a hasty and uneasy air. 19. They took their seats in the plane and set off.

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