Hilpert Bert Cappelle

Ilse Depraetere

Response to

Introduction

In his contribution to this issue, Martin Hilpert documents a shift over time in the collocational preferences of the modal auxiliary may. Hilpert's paper is interesting beyond the empirical tools he brings to bear on this topic, as he also pleads for another shift, a theoretical one. In his treatment of may's changing collocates, Hilpert (this issue, p. 82) proposes that we move away from conceiving constructions as "schemas with slots" towards seeing them as "networks of connections": "a constructional view needs to pay close attention to the mutual associations between modal auxiliaries and the lexical elements with which they occur" (this issue, p. 67).

As Hilpert argues, the topic of modal verb constructions is a challenging one for Construction Grammar, since it is not immediately obvious that such constructions exist at all. Modal verbs do not seem to enter into configurations that are semantically non-compositional, exhibit unpredictable formal properties or are subject to unexpected constraints. The only clear motivation for a constructional view is the observation that a modal verb combines with some infinitives much more frequently than could be expected (and with other infinitives much less frequently than expected).

We agree with Hilpert that a structure such as [can + infinitive] is not semantically or formally abnormal and has no special restrictions. This is also the case for an inverted structure such as [should + subject NP + infinitive], which falls naturally from the general grammatical pattern common to all core modals. Nevertheless, if we add more elements to such kernel structures, extending them to the left, right or in both directions, we may find modal verb idioms which do have idiosyncratic semantic or formal properties and constraints. In our own contribution (Cappelle and Depraetere, this issue), we have discussed some examples of such longer sequences, such as the idiom Not if I can help it, which is routinely interpreted as a closed conditional ('I can help it'), is relatively fixed in form (?This won't happen if I can help it) and does not permit standard permutations (*If I can help it, then not).

In this response to Hilpert's paper, we will both support and extend his main claim. On the one hand, we will argue that Hilpert is right in stressing the importance of collocations in describing speakers' knowledge of language. We will do so by taking the modal verb must as a case, although we will not compare the collocational preferences of present-day must with those of must as used in previous periods. Rather, we will only use contemporary data. On the other hand, we will argue that Hilpert's emphasis on a modal's collocational preferences need notand in fact should notbe restricted to the following lexical infinitive. In short, we aim to adopt Hilpert's focus on the collocational profile of a modal verb, showing that we can obtain further descriptive benefits by widening this focus so as to include several collocating elements at a time.

How can we find strong collocates of must?

Taking seriously Hilpert's claim that collocational preferences are part of speakers' knowledge of language, we will here demonstrate a simple corpus methodology for identifying stored sequences containing a modal verb, beginning with two-word sequences (i.e. must followed by one lexical item). Just like Hilpert, we aim to get a better grip on the meaning of the modal verb by looking at the words it combines with. As Firth (1957: 11) famously put it, "You shall know a word by the company it keeps". Our approach is also inspired by De [START_REF] Haan | The relevance of constructions for the interpretation of modal meaning: the case of must[END_REF] discussion of a wide variety of constructions with must. De Haan (2012: 703) points out that must is like most other modals in exhibiting polysemy: it has at least an epistemic and non-epistemic meaning (cp. There must have been some kind of mistake here vs. We must all stand together). He then argues that the constructions around this modal "are part of the grammatical information speakers and hearers have that they can draw on to disambiguate between the various meanings of must" (De Haan 2012: 722). These constructions can either be located at (what he refers to as) the micro-level or the macro-level. This does not entirely correspond to that of Traugott (2008) between micro-constructions and macroconstructions (between which there are also what she calls meso-constructions). For De Haan, microlevel constructions are "constructions involving specific lexical elements". Examples of micro-level must constructions are deontic must constructions like I must admit… and I must confess…, which functions as "pragmatic markers of hedging for the sentence as a whole" (De Haan 2012: 725). At the macro-level, we find "a more abstract set of constructions based on a combination of must with grammatical categories such as person or tense/aspect" (De Haan 2012: 722-723). Examples of macro-level must constructions are must + perfect (with evidence of fusion: musta + past participle) and must + progressive, which are "solidly interpreted as epistemic" (De Haan 2012: 725; see also Wärnsby (2006 and this issue) for detailed analysis of the impact of tense and aspectual markers on modal interpretation).

So, how can we find the most strongly collocating lexical elements around the modal, in order to identify stored must constructions? There are at least two possibilities to measure collocational strength of a combination. One simple method involves the raw frequency of the combination. Based on this measure, one could argue that the set of must constructions should include must be, must have, must not, must also, must go and the like, which rank high in a frequency-based list generated by a collocation search in a large corpus such as the BNC or COCA [START_REF] Davies | The Corpus of Contemporary American English: 450 million words, 1990present[END_REF]. A problem of this method is that it yields combinations which, though very frequent, may not actually be stored. For instance, must also might be nothing but a construct, that is, an attested but non-memorized instantiation of the pattern [must + adverb] and/or of the pattern [auxiliary + also]. A more insightful method makes use of Mutual Information (MI), which measures how often two items co-occur as a proportion of their separate occurrence. If we order a collocation search in a large corpus by MI score, we retrieve combinations such as must confess, must perforce, must admit, must precede, must notify and the like. Such a list is more 'relevant' because it reveals which words combine with the modal more often than could be expected on the basis of the frequency of those words in other environments. This method, too, has a disadvantage, namely that it tends to give too much weight to infrequent collocates. For instance, in the BNC, must carbon-date has a very high MI score, but this is for no other reason than that there is just one occurrence of carbon-date in this corpus, which happens to be after must. A solution to this problem is imposing a frequency threshold of, say, 5 (or 10 or 50, depending on the size of the corpusthe larger the corpus, the higher one may want to set the threshold).

Construction Grammarians often make use of collostructional analysis [START_REF] Stefanowitsch | Collostructions: Investigating the interaction between words and constructions[END_REF], which is a set of methods to measure the strength of attraction (or repulsion) of lexical items to one or more positions in a construction, taking into account the frequency of these items in the corpus as a whole (or in one or more alternative constructions). One method in the family of collostructional analyses is collexeme analysis, which aims at ranking items according to their strength of attraction to an open slot in one construction. We used this method to see which items are attracted to the post-modal slot of the schema [mustused as a modal + __ ] in the BNC, for which we used Mark Davies's interface [START_REF] Davies | BYU-BNC[END_REF]. An important drawback of the collexeme method is that it cannot tell us which lexical items in the entire corpus are most strongly associated with modal must in that slot; it can only tell us which of the items in a list of good collocate candidates score best. In other words, we first have to establish a set of lexical items which we suspect are good collocates for must and subsequently perform a collexeme analysis on those items that indeed co-occur with must.1 This is how we compiled such a list. First, we looked up the fifty most frequent combinations of must (used as a modal auxiliary) and any following lexical item in BYU-BNC. Next, we added the fifty highest MI-scoring combinations of modal must and a following word with a minimum joint frequency of 10. We thereby excluded all combinations that already occurred in the high-frequency list, but added combinations to the list until we had fifty additional items, thus obtaining a combined list of hundred potential collocates.

On this combined high-frequency plus high-MI-score list, we ran a collexeme analysis in the statistical environment R, using Gries' ( 2007) script. This analysis requires looking up the frequencies of the individual items, which have to be fed into a table on which the computation is based. The need to look up frequencies of items one by one means that the collexeme analysis is a rather laborious method. It would therefore be interesting to know whether it really provides better results than the other two methods mentioned above. Fortunately, given the nature of our input list used in executing the script for collexeme analysis, we can compare the output of that analysis to the results obtained by the raw frequency measure and the Mutual Information score. Table 1 contains the 40 strongest collexemes after must. The list does consist exclusively of combinations of must with the infinitive of a lexical verb. There are also combinations of must with an adverb (e.g. always, therefore, not). In boldface are the items which also appear in the top 40 high-frequency combinations and underlined are the items which also appear in the top 40 combinations with a high MI score. Note that we weeded out high MI-scoring items that already occurred on the high-frequency list and while a few items in Table 1 are nonetheless both in boldface and underlined. That is because we here use the top 40 MIscoring combinations prior to removal of doubles. The predominance of items in boldface suggests that the collexeme analysis favours frequent combinations rather than ones with a high Mutual Information score. Nevertheless, we find that some of the latter are included. Note, for instance, that confess is in the top twenty strongest collexemes but is not even among the forty most frequently used words following must. (In fact, it ranks sixtieth on the raw frequency list.) If we compare the list of items in Table 1 with the forty highest-ranking combinations sorted by MI score whose minimum joint frequency is fifty (instead of ten), we find that twenty-three (rather than eight) items in Table 1 occur in that top 40 MI-based list. So, we can produce a fairly reliable list of collocates, which overlaps to a large extent with the output of a rather time-consuming collexeme analysis, by simply sorting search results by MI score in [START_REF] Davies | BYU-BNC[END_REF] interface -this is called sorting by "relevance" thereand setting a quite high minimum frequency for the retrieved combinations. Since such a procedure gives an output not altogether dissimilar to that of a collexeme analysis (which is based here on frequent combinations complemented with high MIscoring combinations in the first place), we will in the next section keep using MI scores as a measure for collocational strength.

Looking at more than two words

A list of strong collexemesor, for that matter, high MI-scoring combinationsdoes not seem to give us that much direct insight into modal meaning. It just points towards some likely stored combinations, including such micro-constructions (cf. p. 87) as must say, must admit, must confess and some (parts of) macro-constructions (cf. again p. 87), such as must be and must have. The latter may or may not be followed by a past participlewe just cannot know this from the collexeme analysis alone. In other words, the must+word combinations we have retrieved so far do not necessarily capture complete constructions. To see what we mean by this, consider the combinations must continue, which is a quite frequent combination -it's in place 51 on a frequency-based rankingand which has an MI score above 3 (a standard threshold), namely 4.05. On the basis of this high frequency and considerable collocational strength, we could be led to assume, as apparently does Constantine the Russian frog in the film Muppets Most Wanted, that this combination can effortlessly be combined with a subject NP such as the show:

(1) Constantine: "As the saying goes, the show must continue in a timely fashion" (The Muppets Most Wanted)

Needless to say, Constantine here misuses a familiar sequence (The show must go on). Such a comical deviation from a standard formulation highlights the need to look at more than two co-occurring word, when it comes to identifying modal verb constructions. But is The show must go on really a construction? Given that its form is fixed, it certainly is. The fact that only a non-native speaker of English would manage to change the wording is proof that competent speakers of English have memorized the form associated with the meaning. And there is also something semantically noncompositional about the combination: not the non-spatial meaning of go on, which is used as synonym for continue elsewhere as well, but the use of the show to refer to any activity which demands some prolonged effort. The saying has an entry in the Cambridge Advanced Learner's Dictionary, where it is aptly explained as something "said to encourage someone to continue with what they are doing, even if they are experiencing difficulties". What we need, then, is a procedure to find such longer modal verb constructions, going beyond two-word combinations.

In his search for a semantic characterization of may, Hilpert also looks at more than two words. Using a sophisticated statistical technique, he groups may's co-occurring lexical infinitives by the degree to which these infinitives share collocates in a text window of four words to the left and to the right. This eventually allows him to construct a visualisation of the 'semantic landscape' of may, where lexical infinitives that have many neighbouring words at similar frequencies in common are placed close to each other. This does give us some insight in the semantic profile of may, as semantically similar verbs cluster together. Moreover, Hilpert shows how such clusters may wax or wane over time. For instance, the semantic cluster made up of may depend, may indicate and may involve, in which may is used epistemically, has grown in frequency since the early nineteenth century: despite a visible lull in growth or even decrease in the middle period, this cluster has now absorbed collocations such as may affect and may contribute. By contrast, while non-epistemic combinations such as may say and may thank were quite frequent in the first half of the nineteenth century, we now combine may much less often with these speech act verbs.

Hilpert's methodology makes explicit specific mini-constructions of may with an infinitive and it results in interesting insights in collocational shifts. With respect to the former, the lexical proximity of the verbs following may seems to fall out of their shared collocates. If we take again the case of say and thank: in Hilpert's semantic landscape they are placed in close proximity to each other, on the basis of their shared occurrence with like (as in I would like to say/thank…), please (as in Please don't say that and Oh, yes please! Thank you)2 and several dozens of other lexical items that are often used in their immediate environment (even, as is obvious from the examples above, sometimes in rather different ways). May say and may thank are arguably two-word constructions, the functional pole of which can be characterized in large part in term of the shared lexical meaning of the infinitives (verbs of saying). However, this is probably not the end of the story. A crucial difference between may say and may thank, if we look more closely at their use in COHA [START_REF] Davies | The Corpus of Historical American English: 400 million words[END_REF], is that may say is predominantly used with I and only sporadically with you as a subject, whereas the reverse pattern holds for may thank. This difference is important, as it reflects (previous generations of) speakers' stored knowledge of how these combinations function pragmatically. In other words, it will be useful to expand the methodology so as to include the left-hand context of the modal as well in order to arrive at an all-encompassing semantic network of constructions.

We would like to present another, admittedly more manual method to retrieve interesting longer sequences containing a modal verb, which takes into account the context preceding the modal verbs as well.

1. In Mark Davies's BYU-BNC interface, we look for items to the left or right of must (used as a modal), setting a minimum frequency of 50 occurrences for these word pairs and keeping combinations with a minimum MI score of 3. This gives as output combinations such as must confess, must admit, must surely and so on. In total, we can thus extract 70 combinations from BYU-BNC. 2. We enter these word pairs as new search items and look again for collocating items to the left or to the right, in the way described in the previous step. For the pair must admit, for example, this yields the three-word sequences I must admit and must admit that. Some pairs do not have any strong collocates (e.g. must satisfy, must contain), others have several (especially must be and must have). In total, we can thus obtain 98 three-word sequences. 3. We continue the procedure until no more collocating words can be added to either the left or the right of any of the sequences already obtained. We extracted 19 four-word sequences (e.g. you must be joking) and 4 five-word sequences (e.g. it must be remembered that).

These longer strings (also known as lexical n-grams) allow us to get a better grip on the meaning of modal must and how it is formally manifested. One of the form-function generalizations we can draw is that deontic must is often used with a passive infinitive (cf. ( 2)) or with periphrastic modal expressions of ability or willingness (cf. (3)):

(2) care must be taken, must be exercised, must be accompanied by, must be based on, must be regarded as, must be seen as, must be understood (3) must be able to, must be capable of, must be prepared to This means that pedagogical or descriptive grammars of English would more aptly provide sentences containing Care must be taken (not) to… or The candidate must be capable of… as representative examples of the standard deontic use of must than, say, You must go now, which, though clearly not ungrammatical, may not be stored as a construction and does not reflect how must is more typically used.

A second form-function generalization concerns a separate deontic use of must, with verbs of concession. In this use, must can still be used with a passive infinitive (e.g. it must be admitted…), but we more commonly find I as a subject (e.g. I must admit…, I must confess…). That this is a separate construction is supported by the observation that the verb say acquires a concessive meaning by being used in this pattern (I must say that… = 'I must admit that…'). 3Thirdly, another stored deontic use involves verbs of remembering or (mental) observing and serves to stress a particular point. Some of the sequences we retrieved are given in (4) share this function:

(4) must be recognized, must be noted, we must remember, you must remember, must remember that, it must be remembered that, it must be stressed that, must be borne in mind

These sequences are part of what might be considered to be some kind of evidential expression or an expression of 'de-subjectification', as the underlying idea seems to be, 'This is not just my opinion; it's a generally accepted one'.

Finally, as had already been noted earlier, there is an epistemic use of must, which involves non-passive be (used instead as an existential verb, as a copula or a progressive auxiliary) or the perfect infinitive (often of a verb of cognition, perception, sensation or appearance). In ( 5) and ( 6) we illustrate this with some of the multi-word sequences we retrieved with the method described above:

(5) there must be something, there must be some, must be mad, you must be joking (6) someone must have, must have known, must have seen, must have heard, must have felt, must have looked, must have seemed, must have been

We have shown here that must does not have a single meaning/use, nor even just two meanings/uses, a deontic and an epistemic one. Rather, there are several more specific functional 'hotspots' in the semantic network where we find expressions clustering together. Although we adopted a rather different methodology, the picture sketched here corresponds to what Hilpert (this issue, p. 80) found for may: "the semantic landscape of may is pluricentric. Instead of a single group of verbs acting as a solitary attractor, there are several peaks that reflect the varied and heterogeneous meaning potential of may."

Some conclusions and further outlook

We fully agree with Hilpert that by looking at the lexically specific environments of a modal verb we can get a better understanding of what that modal verb means, that is, what its functions are. Linguists working outside the framework of Construction Grammar may object that these functions are simply the product of combining what the modal inherently means and what these environments mean. However, as we have argued more fully in our main paper (Cappelle and Depraetere, this issue), we believe that some of the strings we identify by applying the sort of collocation-based methods shown in Hilperts paper and our response are directly associated with a certain interpretation, in spite of their apparent compositionality. We hope to have shown in this response that Hilpert's focus on collocational preferences is extremely valuable and that it can even lead to a better identification of actual constructions if collocational ties between the modal and other clause elements than the following lexical infinitive are considered. In that respect, we agree with [START_REF] Boogaart | Modal versus temporal readings of auxiliaries: A constructionist view[END_REF], who claims: "Within construction grammar, collexeme analysis at the level of the lemma and the attracted infinitive is still rather abstract. To establish 'modal constructions', we need to differentiate according to at least

• Specific form of the verb (person, number, tense)

• Other elements besides infinitives (negation, adverbs/particles) • Genre/register" [START_REF] Boogaart | Modal versus temporal readings of auxiliaries: A constructionist view[END_REF] Boogaart made this claim with respect to Dutch, where different inflectional forms of the same modal/temporal auxiliary zullen 'will', namely zullen itself, zal, zult, zou and zouden each have rather distinct collocational preferences. English is inflectionally less rich than Dutch, but it would be interesting to compare in full detail may and might, especially since Hilpert's paper has shown how the collocational profile of may has moved surprisingly close to that of might (and also to those of must, should and could) over the last couple of centuries: which differences still exist between these two modals? In our response, we did pay attention to other elements besides infinitives, but for future research, it would be worthwhile to look at which expressions are genre-or register-neutral and which ones are restricted to a particular genre and/or register. It could be expected that it must be borne in mind that… is typical of academic or in any case formal language use, while you must be joking is used in informal conversations.

Charting the elements that frequently and 'relevantly' combine with modal verbs may have interesting pedagogical applications. If it is our aim to teach learners really common chunks of language, then we should not present examples that are rather loosely knit together and which therefore do not capture the most typical uses of a modal. For instance, on the Learning English website of the British Council, we find examples such as those in (7), which illustrate that "we use must to say that it is necessary to do something":4 Observe that the examples on the British Council website put in boldface just the modal and the following infinitive, while we feel that the learner's attention should also be directed to other elements, especially the subject. Note also that the examples do not include any of the highly typical uses we identified, such as I must admit… (i.e., a concessive use with I as subject) or Children must be accompanied by an adult (i.e., a passive example). One way in which we can exploit corpora for language learning purposes is by extracting common structural strings that underlie sequences of five or so words (cf. [START_REF] Cappelle | Towards an n-grammar of English[END_REF]. Ideally, we may want to optimize the approach used here along the lines proposed Forsberg et al (2014), where part-of-speech categories and specific lexical items jointly make up a large table of data from which an intelligent computer algorithm extracts hybrid n-grams of the right grain size. It is then left to pure statistics to identify linguistically or didactically pertinent micro-level constructions (e.g. You must be joking!), macro-level constructions (e.g. X must + perfect infinitive) and blends of these (e.g. It must have been Adj(P) for you). And whatever the role of the linguist may then be in sifting out noise from automatically generated construction candidates, in interpreting the results and in manually providing further semantic or pragmatic annotations to them, we foresee that these endeavours will ultimately lead to natural language processing applications such as sentence disambiguation and automatic text classification, aimed at setting apart, for example, emotionally neutral, instructive sentences or texts from ones that are persuasive or betray strong sentiments.

In the end, conceiving of constructions either as schemas with slots or as nodes in a vast lexical network may turn out to be choice we need not make. Both perspectives are interesting and necessary: they tie in, respectively, with the generative, creative potential of language to convey new ideas and with its role as grab bag of familiar formulae for expressing one's feelings or making people do things as fast as possible.

  (7) a. You must stop at a red light. b. Everyone must bring something to eat. c. You can wear what you like, but you must look neat and tidy. d. I'm sorry, but you mustn't make a noise in here.

Table 1 .

 1 The 40 strongest must+collexeme pairs, based on BYU-BNC; in boldface: items among the 40 most frequent must+word combinations; underlined: items among the 40 highest MI-scoring combinations (with min. frequency of 10)

	1. must be	11. must therefore	21. must decide	31. must now
	2. must have	12. must surely	22. must learn	32. must keep
	3. must not	13. mustn't	23. must pay	33. must accept
	4. must also	14. must get	24. must consider	34. must find
	5. must go	15. must come	25. must remain	35. must contain
	6. must take	16. must remember	26. must ask	36. must include
	7. must make	17. must know	27. must tell	37. must wait
	8. must say	18. must confess	28. must look	38. must do
	9. must admit	19. must ensure	29. must give	39. must satisfy
	10. must always	20. must provide	30. must try	40. must recognise

This objection is only fully valid if one uses a web interface such as the one for the COCA corpus or the BNC corpus via Mark Davies's website. If one downloads the entire corpus, one could write a script that first retrieves all sequences of must tagged as a modal verb followed by an item, then looks up the corpus frequencies of those post-must items and finally uses all these data to conduct a collexeme analysis producing scores of attraction or repulsion of each of these items. Obviously, this requires that the corpus be fully available and that the researcher have some programming skills.

In COHA, the use of thank in thank you is tagged as a lexical verb.

Fraser (1976) uses the concept of 'hedged performative' to refer to the combination of I must with verbs like admit and confess. Combinations with verbs other than those which express an act of assertion are also discussed in this paper.

http://learnenglish.britishcouncil.org/en/english-grammar/verbs/modal-verbs/ability-permission-requests-andadvice, last accessed 30 September 2015.


Stefan Thim, 2012. Phrasal Verbs: The English Verb-Particle Construction and its History (Topics in English Linguistics 78). Berlin and New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Pp. xiv + 302. ISBN 978-3-11-025702-1. Reviewed by Bert Cappelle, University of Lille 3 'How 'English' are the phrasal verbs really?' and how did this highly familiar but often ill-described construction evolve 'from its early history up to the present'? (p. 1). Thim's book, which may be considered less as an ambitious empirical investigation of the topic than as a competent critical survey of its literature, aims at answering these two questions. That these questions are intertwined is clear from the answers they receive in this work.

First, the phrasal verb is not very special to English. While the term phrasal verb 'is rarely ever used except with respect to English' (p. 2), Thim points out, as many scholars have done before him, that there are close parallels to be found in other languages, most notably in the other present-day Germanic languages. For instance, the German prefix verb aufgeben 'give up' may occur as two separate words, with the prefix auf (a cognate of up) even obligatorily split from the verb by a Direct Object noun phrase (e.g. Sie gab ihre Arbeit auf 'She gave up her job'). Thim further cites examples of particle verbs from Danish, Dutch, Norwegian Nynorsk and Swedish, as well as from Afrikaans, Faroese, Icelandic and Yiddish, to support the claim that the English verb-particle construction is certainly not an isolated language-specific phenomenon.

Second, these close parallels then help Thim answer the question about the evolution of the 'English' phrasal verb, whose origin can be traced back at least to Proto-Germanic. In Indo-European languages more generally, Thim reminds us, prefix verbs and particle verbs have developed out of adverb-verb sequences. And in fact, in various languages belonging to genetically more distant families, particle-like verb prefixes, or 'preverbs', have formed out of adverbs, typically derived themselves from previously independent relational nouns. English may look special in that particles now standardly follow the verb, leaving aside exceptional structures of the type In came a strange figure (more on which below). However, in Old English, and still in early Middle English, particles could appear in both preverbal and postverbal position, depending to some extent on clause type (subordinate or main) and finiteness, rather like the separable prefixes we encounter in Continental West-Germanic languages such as present-day Dutch or German.

Thim strongly rejects the widespread misconception 'that there must have been a 'rise' of the phrasal verb ' (p. 145), that is, that the phrasal verb was a Middle English or later innovation which superseded an earlier pattern, one with inseparable prefixes. Rather, Thim argues, the apparent emergence of postverbal particles in English is nothing but an epiphenomenon of independent, wellestablished changes in the language system, the most important of which is the long-term shift from basic O(bject)V(erb) order in Proto-Germanic to VO order in Modern English. In Old English, the oldest order, Object -particle -Verb, was typically found in subordinate clauses and occasionally still in main clauses. When the verb started to occupy the second position in clauses ('V2 movement'), unstressed preverbs that had fused with the verb stem moved along with it as inseparable prefixes. By contrast, preverbs carrying stress ('particles') remained independent and stayed behind in final position when the verb itself moved leftward. It was first the finite verb (v) which moved (O prt V v → v O prt V), causing a clausal brace with the non-finite main verb (v … V), but the latter subsequently rejoined the finite verb in a process known as exbraciation (v O prt V → v V O prt). Extraposition of especially heavy objects may have played a role in dissolving the brace and further yielded the alternative structure with the particle immediately following the verb (v V prt O).

It is not immediately apparent to the reader to what extent this account offers new insights compared to previous analyses. Some more explicit comparison with for instance [START_REF] Elenbaas | The synchronic and diachronic syntax of the English verb-particle combination[END_REF] analysis would have been welcome. On the one hand, Thim discusses the general development of English word order in rather bewildering detail -for example, he provides early 5th century examples from the Northwest Germanic runic corpus and quantitative data from Denison's (1987) study of early West Saxon clausal patterns. On the other hand, he glosses rather too swiftly over a key diagram, on the causes of changes in particle position in Medieval English (Figure 3-2), leaving the reader wondering how to account for a couple of patterns shown there (prt V v O and v prt V O), especially since in the subsequent pages (pp. 105-15) none of the examples which could possibly serve as illustrations for these patterns contains a finite auxiliary that is distinct from the main verb. Nonetheless, the general idea is clear: particles didn't move from a preverbal to a postverbal position; it is the verb that moved to a pre-particle position.

Thim's book appeared in the same year as Los et al.'s (2012) Morphosyntactic Change: A Comparative Study of Particles and Prefixes. The two monographs cover much the same ground and I therefore initially intended to compare their claims and analyses in a double review. However, this would have made for an even lengthier piece than this review already is. Besides, [START_REF] Los | Morphosyntactic change: A comparative study of particles and prefixes[END_REF] has meanwhile been reviewed by Den [START_REF] Dikken | Morphosyntactic change: A comparative study of particles and prefixes[END_REF][START_REF] Hoppermann | Review of Bettelou Los[END_REF]. At a superficial level of comparison, there is no doubt that Thim's publication is extremely well researched; its list of references totals 38 pages, almost thrice the number of pages with references in Los et al.'s book, which in turn already puts to shame the two pages containing a mere 16 titles treating phrasal verbs and the odd footnote citing an additional publication in [START_REF] Bolinger | The phrasal verb in English[END_REF] influential monograph. Despite this, Thim's book is much less concerned with contemporary linguistic theory than Los et al.'s. It mentions Construction Grammar as a suitable theoretical approach but does little more than pay lip service to it, and though it mentions relevant publications on grammaticalization and lexicalization, it does not actively engage in current debates surrounding these general topics.

Thim's real concerns lie elsewhere. He is interested not just in the development of the construction itself but also in the origins of certain stubborn, questionable views embraced by linguists, language commentators and lexicographers. He critically re-examines the classic study by [START_REF] Kennedy | The Modern English verb-adverb combination[END_REF], which he blames for 'an undercurrent of tacit assumptions about phrasal verbs in most subsequent 20th century research' that have never seriously been put to the test and which on closer scrutiny turn out to be 'rather dubious ' (p. 118). Likewise, Thim evaluates the treatment of phrasal verbs in some major syntactic handbooks, which he finds rather confused, and in a number of widely-used nineteenth and twentieth century historical dictionaries, all of which he considers unsatisfactory: 'they fail to document the Old and Middle English particle verbs sufficiently and transparently, and thus contribute to the wrong impression that phrasal verbs are an essentially new structure which fully emerges only towards the Modern English period' (p. 144).

Thim has also conducted interesting philological research into attitudes towards phrasal verbs. He insightfully challenges the received opinion that the construction has always been felt to be 'native' or 'colloquial'. Thim is at his best when he reveals how textual evidence fails to substantiate the existence of negative attitudes commonly ascribed to the dictionary-maker Samuel Johnson and to style-conscious writers such as the publisher of James Cook's journal and John Dryden, author of the Essay of Dramatick Poesie. Thim concludes that phrasal verbs weren't stigmatised in the late seventeenth and eighteenth century or systematically replaced by Latinate alternatives. Unfortunately, as Thim's book is the published version of his 2009 PhD thesis, it apparently has not had the benefit of including findings from [START_REF] Wild | Attitudes towards English usage in the late modern period: the case of phrasal verbs[END_REF] PhD thesis on perceptions of the phrasal verb in Late Modern English, thus rendering void his claim that 'the prescriptive attitudes of the 19th century are as yet fairly unchartered [sic] ground ' (p. 233).

The present review deviates from the standard format in that it does not summarize each book chapter in turn. For a useful chapter-to-chapter summary, I refer the reader to [START_REF] Brinton | The phrasal verb and its history[END_REF] excellent (and generally positive) review in Language. In what follows, I will selectively focus on some further common views which Thim contests and which people studying the construction should do well to stop entertaining. In addition, in the spirit of Thim himself, I will touch upon a few of his own claims which I do not consider entirely correct and which run the risk of being perpetuated too, if left unrefuted. After all, the positions taken in this new book on phrasal verbs deserve the same kind of careful scrutiny that its author applies to claims made in the preceding literature.

Phrasal verbs are by definition idiomatic

There is a flourishing market in English language learning resources which make out phrasal verbs to be hard to acquire because of their unpredictable meanings. However, Thim states quite rightly that their meanings 'range on a cline from purely compositional to highly idiomatic' (p. 11). For practical reasons, Thim in fact distinguishes between 'three, albeit somewhat idealised, semantic types of phrasal verbs, which have been characterized as 'literal', 'aspectual' and non-compositional' (or 'idiomatic')' (p. 13). The former two types together form a subclass of 'compositional' combinations, with either a directional or an aspectual particle. The reason for including these semantically transparent combinations is that 'only compositional combinations show the full range of syntactic properties typical of phrasal verbs' (p. 15).

One could of course object that a literal or aspectual particle can be found in noncompositional combinations, too (cf. [START_REF] Jackendoff | English particle constructions, the lexicon, and the autonomy of syntax[END_REF][START_REF] Lohse | Domain minimization in English verbparticle constructions[END_REF][START_REF] Mcintyre | Idiosyncrasy in particle verbs[END_REF]. For instance, in pick something up, the particle is directional but the verb doesn't mean 'choose'; and in beaver away, the particle has the aspectual value also seen in chat away or type away while the 'verb' derives its interpretation of 'work hard' partly from its use in a 'constructional idiom', a notion which Thim recognizes as useful (p. 58) but then chooses not to adopt (p. 72). A minor objection of descriptive inadequacy can be made with respect to Thim's statement that 'fronting of the particle is not possible with the aspectualizing particles' (p. 17; cf. also p. 24: 'fronting of the particle is only passible in compositional combinations with a directional particle'). In fact, as the following examples from GloWbE [START_REF] Davies | GLoWbE. Corpus of Global Web-Based English: 1.9 billion words from speakers in 20 countries[END_REF] show, continuative aspectual particles (cf. (1a-b)) do allow this option and so do certain particles that one can could call 'literal' (semantically independent of the verb) but aren't directional (cf. (1c) [START_REF] Cappelle | And up it rises: Particle preposing in English[END_REF]:

(1) a.

I was told in Penang you must eat eat eat! So away I chomped! (GloWbE) b.

Yet on they dream, the optimists, and on they build. (GloWbE) c.

Out went the lights; the fleet became dim, dark bulks against an intense blue sky that still retained an occasional star. (GloWbE)

According to Thim, the tripartite semantic categorization of phrasal verbs in present-day English mentioned above can be represented 'as the result of two historical processes: first, the metonymical evolution of aspectualizing meaning observable in the particles, and second, the further lexicalization of individual complex words' (p. 182):

verb-particle combination compositional non-compositional directional particle aspectual particle Thim's proposal is neat in its simplicity but somewhat stipulative. It is to be doubted that all verbparticle combinations will over time become non-compositional. For instance, for as long as walk in remains recognizable as a verb-particle combination, it may well retain a purely compositional meaning. Further, Thim could have elaborated a bit more on the reason why the shift from a directional to an aspectual meaning has to be understood as metonymical and not metaphorical in nature [START_REF] Traugott | The development of English aspectual systems: Aspectualizers and post-verbal particles[END_REF]) while a combination as a whole can acquire a (conventionalized) metaphorical use, as will be shown next.

Old English particle verbs were semantically compositional

On the basis of the above explanation, it could be assumed that verb-particle combinations in Old English were all still compositional. Even though 'the vast majority of particle tokens in Old English will have been spatial' (p. 181), it is not the case that they all were, as is clear from Thim's introductory chapter, where he nicely illustrates the Old English particle verb forþfēran not only with two possible orderings (forð ferde and ferde forþ) but also for each ordering in its literal sense of 'travel/move away or by' and its metaphorically derived sense of 'die' (cf. also pass away in presentday English). So, the processes shown in Figure 1 above aren't locked in time but can be observed to be in force throughout history. Thim argues in various places that particles and the earlier native (Germanic) prefixes, 'with their similar spatial etymologies, were bound to take similar paths of semantic development ' (p. 195). The processes thus acquire the status of universally valid laws of development, operating across boundaries between languages and across historical periods.

Phrasal verbs are word formations

A recurrent debate in the literature on phrasal verbs is whether they are words or phrases. Thim seems to circumvent the issue by calling them, following [START_REF] Booij | Separable complex verbs in Dutch: A case of periphrastic word formation[END_REF] treatment of separable complex verbs in Dutch, instances of 'periphrastic word formation' (p. 62), that is, word forms consisting of more than one word. He then states more precisely that they can 'be analysed as compounds (compositional phrasal verbs: combination of a verb and a spatial particle), but also as derivations in those cases where the meaning of the particle is different from the meaning of the free adverb (in particular in aspectual combinations) or has a clearly derivational function, as in [furnitured out, terraced out, sexed up, big up]' (p. 65).

I would be the last to object to the view that phrasal verbs can be treated by language users as lexically stored items, even with word status (see [START_REF] Cappelle | Heating up or cooling up the brain? MEG evidence that phrasal verbs are lexical units[END_REF] for neurolinguistic evidence). Yet, we should probably also accommodate for their realization as syntactic phrases, since the verb and the particle can notoriously be separated from each other by phrasal material (e.g. let the dogs out, pull the car over, …), which would be hard to explain if they were always word parts. A solution may be sought in an 'allostructional' model, which Thim mentions himself (p. 71), as a way of linking the two word order patterns of transitive phrasal verbs (V prt NP and V NP prt) (cf. Cappelle 2006, Goldberg to appear). These two structures could be analysed as two variant realizations of a single lexeme whose morphological or syntactic status is underspecified [START_REF] Cappelle | Contextual cues for particle placement: Multiplicity, motivation, modeling[END_REF], Farrell 2004).

The category-changing and valency-changing properties of phrasal verbs (for the latter, see especially McIntyre 2007) needn't be taken as support for a derivational word-formation analysis, as Thim does. Syntactic structures, too, can force a non-verb into the verb position (e.g. {debt/junkfood/X-boxing} themselves to death (all of these attested in GloWbE)) or provide arguments not selected by the verb itself (e.g. {laugh/worry} oneself silly, cry oneself to sleep). As it would be implausible to treat silly, into a stupor, to {boredom/death/exhaustion}, etc. as affixes or even as affixoids, I see no reason why one should suggest that particles in similar structures are 'more or less affixal in nature', as Thim does (thereby quoting Bolinger (1971: 112)).

Particles necessarily carry stress

A recurrent claim in the literature, one which can also be found in Thim's book, is that 'in phrasal verbs, the particle carries stress' (p. 68). While this is true if the particle follows the verb directly (thus allowing to distinguish phrasal verbs from prepositional verbs, e.g., Which number did she look úp? vs. Which book did she lóok at? (p. 27)), it very often is not the case when the verb and the particle are separated by a non-pronominal object NP, as is shown by these examples from Bolinger (1971: 51):

(2) a.

Let's take our friénds over. b.

They shot the whole pláce up.

This observation is important, as it actually lends further support to Thim's suggestion that the 'avoidance of placing particles in sentence-final position' by 17th and 18th century authors may have been 'a hypercorrect application of the normative rules against sentence-final prepositions' (p. 235): since prepositions are typically unstressed and since sentence-final particles often are too, the two categories could easily have been targeted by the same rule.

Native prefixes were ousted by borrowed ones after the Norman Conquest

English verb-particle combinations are often discussed in contrast with native inseparable prefix verbs, which, as we saw above, represent an older stage of English. Only a handful of these prefixes are still used in present-day English (be-, mis-, over-, un-and under-), but in Old English there were more than a couple of dozens of them. It is well known that in the centuries following the Norman conquest, many verbs of Romance origin were added to the Middle English lexicon. Among this influx of borrowings from French or Latin, there were numerous verbs already carrying a prefix: admit, combine, dissent, exclude, import, suppress, etc. As Thim remarks, 'the new verbal prefixes borrowed into the language via these loanwords have traditionally been taken to seal the demise of many of the older inherited prefixes' (p. 6).

However, Thim convincingly argues that this view is anachronistic. The majority of native Germanic prefixes had already been well on their way to disappearing since pre-Old English times. Their recession was due to such language-internal factors as progressive phonetic attrition in unaccented syllables, leading to morphological decay and ultimately loss of the affected prefix, and desemantization, whereby the prefix's originally spatial meaning gradually weakened, becoming vaguely aspectual or intensifying, functionally diffuse and in the end semantically vacuous. Thim illustrates some of this with the Germanic preverb GE-, which in Old English was a productive prefix but in Middle English underwent phonetic reduction to i-and then zero. This phonetic reduction may not necessarily have gone hand in hand with semantic bleaching, but in any case, ge-must have undergone functional loss already in Old English, unlike the retained prefix be-, which still has a marginally productive derivational use in present-day English -Thim doesn't give examples of this but one could mention bejewelled and bespectacled, as well as novel forms such as behatted, bejeaned, beketchuped, etc. Thim also points out that in present-day Dutch and German, be-still has a range of productive derivational uses, while ge-has grammaticalized as a past participle marker. He further discusses the cognate preverb ga in Gothic, a language which allows us a glimpse of an even earlier stage of prefixation in Germanic (namely one in which preverbs could still occur independently) than Old English does. Already in Gothic, the meaning of ga seems to have been highly elusive. Clearly, this shows that the introduction of a new set of prefixes from Romance, though it may have overlapped in time with the decline of native prefixes, cannot have been the cause of it.

The most convincing argument against such a claim is given by Thim in a somewhat cursory remark when he deals with omission and interchangeability of bleached prefixes such as a-, ge-, be-or for-: 'The observation that the loss or substitution of native prefixes occurs first in the Northern dialects must be seen as a strong (and probably conclusive) arguments against the possibility of French influence (via the borrowing of French verbs)' (p. 172).

Native prefixes were ousted by the new post-verbal particles

Thim also refutes a related claim often made in the literature, namely that phrasal verbs, as a relatively new phenomenon in the English language, replaced an older pattern of verbs with Old English prefixes. This certainly cannot be correct, given that not all Old English prefixes have been lost in present-day English, as we have seen. But more importantly, Thim argues that phrasal verbs should not be seen as a (partial) replacement of a more archaic system but as a continuation of it. Even as late as in Middle English -the period we associate with the import of Romance prefixes -new Germanicbased prefixes were still added to the English inventory, namely back-, down-, off-, in-, out-and up-(based on my comparison of Thim's Table 5-2 andTable 5-3). As Thim writes, '[t]hese younger (…) prefixes tend to be homonymous with free particles. When in the course of the Middle English period the particles stop occurring in preverbal position, their further development into bound affixes is prevented' (p. 250, from the conclusion; see also p. 164). And he adds, 'In all other respects, however, the particles have turned out to be fully equivalent to the prefixes, as the semantic developments of native prefixes and particles has shown' (p. 250).

I would like to object, however, to the way this conclusion is formulated, as Thim's book does not come near to describing in any detail how prefixes and particles developed semantically. For prefixes Thim mainly refers to semantic weakening and for particles, as mentioned above, he suggests a shift from a directional to an aspectual meaning. Does Thim imply that these two processes boil down to the same thing? Any implication that aspectual particles are semantically weak, or weaker than directional particles, has to be rejected, though. While one might agree that up in, say, liven up does not have much content over and above what the simple verb already expresses by itself, this definitely does not hold for such aspectualizers as on (e.g. read on 'continue or resume reading'), over (e.g. read it over 'read it again') or through (e.g. read it through 'read it in its entirety'). Also, for the emergence of new prefixes in Middle English, it is a pity that Thim contents himself with referring to processes that receive interesting but very schematic representations (p. 85 and p. 88). He never actually shows how these prefixes come into being. This book does not explain, for instance, that down (whether preverbal or postverbal) is derived from late Old English dúne or dún, weakened forms of adúne, which is itself weakened from Old English of dúne, meaning 'off the hill or height' (OED, s.v. down, adv.). Such information could have put some flesh on the bones of the claim that prefixes and postverbal particles develop from nouns. This said, it is hard to find fault with Thim's point that phrasal verbs can't be seen as having supplanted an older system of prefix verbs, in view of the fact that some of the present-day particles are etymologically the same items as some of the somewhat older prefixes, the major difference between them being that they occur in different positions, as a result of the independent word order changes mentioned before. In other words, saying that particles have replaced prefixes is a bit like saying, paradoxically, that they have replaced themselves.

Phrasal verbs are Germanic

It is tempting to see phrasal verbs as Germanic, especially in the light of their frequent comparison with learned Latinate verbs (give up vs. abandon or surrender; put out vs. extinguish, and so on). There are almost no phrasal verbs in which the verb is of Latin origin, since Latinate verbs are often prefixed (cf. supra), and the addition of a particle would therefore sound pleonastic: ?combine together, ?exclude out, ?eradicate out (p. 189).

Interestingly, though, phrasal verbs are less Germanic than one might think. Thim mentions data from one of his previous studies into the etymologies of phrasal verbs in English letters from the 15th and 16th century. More than a quarter of these verbs are formed with a Latin-or, more often, French-derived verb (e.g. advaunce forth, retorne back). Some of these may have gone out of use, but they show that the phrasal verb isn't and never was the all-Germanic alternative to Romance words. Use up and move forward, which in the literature have been mentioned as the common counterparts of the more elevated Latinate verbs consume and advance, both contain a verb of French origin, as Thim rightly points out (p. 40). He concludes: 'As a construction type, particle verbs turn out to be rather insensitive to the etymological origins of their components, as long as the meaning of a simple verb does not preclude its combination with spatial or aspectual particles ' (p. 195). Moreover, if it weren't for Thim's book, one would almost overlook the fact that even a couple of particles, too, have a Romance etymology. Thim mentions apart (p. 157); another French-derived particle is past.

Phrasal verbs used to be colloquial (but aren't anymore)

According to received opinion, phrasal verbs tend to be colloquial, even slangy or vulgar -one may think here of shut up and f---off. Thim argues that this view, still prevailing in the 20th century, 'has its roots in the 18th century as the indirect result of a number of metalinguistic and stylistic factors', which he therefore describes as a 'colloquialization conspiracy ' (p. 251, cf. pp. 233-244). Apart from the normative proscription of preposition stranding which may have led, as mentioned above, to hypercorrect action against particles, Thim also discusses style guides' more general verdict against ending a sentence with too many monosyllables of whatever kind and their ban against 'superfluous' elements, as well as the phrasal verb being treated too readily as 'idiomatic', in the broadest possible way of being characteristically English and semantically irregular (cf. the first claim above). Thim, drawing on earlier studies (including some of his own), argues quite extensively that there is no pre-1800 evidence whatsoever for any colloquialness of the phrasal verb. For instance, the construction wasn't more frequent in personal letters than in other genres. Also, as stated above, up to the end of the 18th century, there are no signs of any dislike of phrasal verbs among early grammarians and lexicographers or any avoidance of them among contemporary writers.

Thim is less clear on whether the construction is or isn't colloquial in present-day English. He writes, '[q]uite clearly, very many of them do belong to the more informal or 'colloquial' registers of the language', but he is unwilling to draw the obvious conclusion from Biber et al.'s (1999) findings about the occurrences of phrasal verbs across registers. He writes: 'the overall infrequency especially of the intransitive phrasal verbs in academic prose need not be connected to their avoidance as being colloquial, but rather with the preference of formal Latinate verbs, and this would not necessarily entail the conclusion that the phrasal verbs are informal' (p. 44). I do not think this dismissal is convincing. Surely, the choice of simple Latinate verbs over verb-particle combinations must be motivated precisely by the feeling that phrasal verbs are considered not appropriate in these registers? The observation that in the BNC [START_REF] Davies | BYU-BNC[END_REF] the frequency of particles in spoken conversation is more than ten times higher than in medicine-related academic texts and still more than five times higher than in administrative writing can mean only one thing to me: the phrasal verb, as a construction, is located towards the colloquial end of the spectrum.

There is no hard evidence for an overall increase in frequency of phrasal verbs

Thim attempts to bring together quantitative data from a number of early studies to get an overview of the long-term development of phrasal verbs from the Middle Ages to the 20th century. Thim does not put much trust in the outcome of his endeavours: 'a meaningful interpretation of the figures … is extremely difficult' and 'we must admit that the figures are completely inconclusive' (p. 212).

It seems to me that Thim has wasted a lot of time and mental energy comparing these earlier studies and being frustrated with their hard-earned but divergent results. In the last couple of years, it has become possible to search a large amount of historical language use via the Google Books project [START_REF] Lin | Syntactic Annotations for the Google Books Ngram Corpus[END_REF], Michel et al. 2010). Figure 2 below shows the results of a search for the particles up, out, on, down, off and in, tracking their frequency in printed books since the end of the Middle English period (1500) to the year 2008, with a 10-year 'smoothing' of the curve. Assuming that the tagging of these items as particles is correct and consistent throughout this period, there now appears to be no reason why Thim should write that 'long-term changes in the frequency of occurrence of the English particle verbs are not known' (p. 120) or should have hedged a statement such as 'an overall increase between the late Middle Ages and today is quite possible ' (p. 214). Up to 1700 (the end of the Early Modern English Period), the development of the individual particles is admittedly messy and spiky (perhaps due to some scarcity in written material from that period), but the overall increase is undeniable. From then on, the evolution of these particles proceeds in sync, especially so for the frequently used particles up and out, suggesting that what is characterized by falls and rises over time here is the verb-particle construction, not individual lexical items. Note the general 19th century increase, for which even Thim finds the evidence in the literature persuasive (p. 251), and the unmistakable post-World War II decrease, which the phrasal verb has fully overcome only these last few years. It is a missed opportunity for a book on the history of the phrasal verb that Thim did not run such a search in Google Books n-gram viewer or in the Corpus of Historical American English (COHA), if only briefly at the last stage of his publication project.

10. We know practically everything there is to know about phrasal verbs.

Phrasal verbs are often regarded as a quintessentially English construction and English is arguably the most widely studied language there is. Therefore, if there is one single pattern which by now should be thoroughly documented and understood in virtually all its details, it has to be the English verb-particle construction. On reading Thim's book, one gets the feeling that this could not be further from the truth. Thim's critical surveying of the literature leads to an (over)abundance of statements, scattered throughout the book, about how little we still know about the history of phrasal verbs and its related constructions. Here is a sample of such assertions: 'Several details of the loss of the Old English prefixes are still in need of further exploration' (p. 164) 'A more-than-cursory, in-depth study of the lexical developments of at least a representative number of particle verbs is conspicuously absent from the literature and would be highly desirable. ' (p. 165) 'the generalizations based on a critical survey of the literature which have been offered in the present section would benefit from more detailed analyses of a large number of verbs and particles' (p. 183) '… so far a satisfactory quantitative account of the history of the phrasal verbs remains to be written. ' (p. 197) Thim is aware of the lacunae in the literature, but hasn't actually addressed them in his own book. But at least, we now know where progress is yet to be made.

By way of conclusion

Thim's book is a new and important milestone in the study of phrasal verbs, tracing its history from Proto-Indo-European and especially Germanic to present times, thus expanding a narrow focus on its wrongly assumed 'Englishness' to a wider cross-linguistic and diachronic recognition of its ties with other languages and with related structures, especially prefixed verbs. Sadly, though, like [START_REF] Spasov | English phrasal verbs[END_REF] pioneering study critiqued by Martin (1990: 32), it 'tantalizes curiosity but does not satisfy it'. Thim takes stock of the vast literature, including some studies he previously carried out himself, but does not offer a new body of empirical data that we are apparently still in need of. Thim rightly rebukes some of the early descriptions of the topic, because the subsequent literature too often uncritically regards these sources as reliable, 'and in several instances the chain of quotes seems to turn into a game of Chinese whispers' (p. 202). Occasionally, however, Thim himself misrepresents certain aspects of the present-day construction, by stating that the particle is always stressed or by treating the construction as belonging to word formation and not (also) to syntax -although the exact status of the verb-particle construction may continue to be a matter for debate.

Thim's approach is both historical and historiographical, as he not only studies the history of the construction as such but is also interested in the history of such descriptions. The book is wellwritten, although its prose is occasionally archaic (e.g. well nigh, a goodly number) and overusing the definite article for plural nouns in their genetic use (e.g. the phrasal verbs). It is generally wellorganised, but Thim could have merged the section on past quantitative studies in chapter 6 with chapter 4, 'Writing the history of the phrasal verb'; it also felt rather odd to find a broad statement such as 'For a general account of the development of phrasal verbs and other types of complex predicates in the history of English, see [START_REF] Traugott | A historical overview of complex predicate types[END_REF]' as late in the book as on page 183. On the whole, the book is explicitly backward-looking, finding hiatuses in past accounts but doing little to fill them. Only in the final pages does Thim sketch new promising avenues for further research, based on his assessment of our current state of knowledge:

'So far we know only little about the exact ways in which individual particles acquire their respective aspectualizing, deriviational or valency-changing properties, and even less about historical patterns of emergence of new idiomatic phrasal verbs. To me it seems that all these issues provide prime examples of constructionalization and can be discussed most fruitfully in the context of surface based exemplar models of language which do not believe any longer in the reality of boundaries between syntax, morphology and the lexicon. ' (pp. 252-53) In spite of its shortcomings, Thim's book deserves praise for being a very erudite survey of previous literature on phrasal verbs and its development. Its double thesis that phrasal verbs aren't characteristically 'English' and that the postverbal position of the particle is a by-product of independent changes in the language is well argued for. Also praiseworthy is Thim's attitude not to take any preconceived idea about phrasal verbs for granted, most notably received opinions about how (if indeed at all) phrasal verbs were stylistically perceived by previous generations. His close examination of early historical sources is exemplary. It is a major reference work for scholars who want to consult a critical, state-of-the-art review of past and current thinking about the verb-particle in the history of English.

Figure 1 .

 1 Figure 1. Semantic development of verb-particle constructions (= Fig. 5-1 in Thim's book)

Figure 2 .

 2 Figure 2. Evolution of the particles up, out, off, down, on and in in English printed books, from 1500 to 2008, via Google Books.