Phrasal verbs/wake up

Phrasal verbs/wake up
Message from passenger75 posted on 16-08-2015 at 13:25:35 (D | E | F)
Hello, would you help me please?
You can't wake up somebody who is playing possum. Dictionaries classify this verb as both separable and inseparable. Is the sentence correct?
How about those only inseparable ones? Is it natural to have a so-called great gap between the verb and the preposition?
Thanks in advance.

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Edited by lucile83 on 17-08-2015 21:55
It is about particles of course, not really verbs.

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Re: Phrasal verbs/wake up from carlabice47, posted on 17-08-2015 at 12:05:15 (D | E)
Thanks
Wake me up before I go...!
Take off your hat: take it off/ take your hat off.
A few verbs followed by particles like up/ down/ out/ in off and on can be separated by the verb by the object , be it a noun or a pronoun.
Look up for those verbs whose particles cannot be separated : eg : look after my dog while I'm away.
Bye bye

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Re: Phrasal verbs/wake up from traviskidd, posted on 18-08-2015 at 15:49:40 (D | E)
Hello,
what you would call an inseparable phrasal verb, I would simply call a verb followed by a preposition that affects the sense of the verb.
In the case of "look after", the preposition "after" denotes following something around. A true phrasal verb is followed by a particle, not a preposition. If a phrasal verb is intransitive, it is often followed by a preposition ("watch out for", "put up with").
If it is transitive, then the direct object may (must, if it is a pronoun) be placed before the particle, which is of course to say that the phrasal verb is separable.
See you.

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Edited by lucile83 on 18-08-2015 21:45

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Re: Phrasal verbs/wake up from melmoth, posted on 19-08-2015 at 03:12:43 (D | E)
Hello everybody,
Traviskidd, I entirely agree with you. I had written an answer to the same effect, but it was erased because I had written it in French. I always get confused with this "English only" section... sorry, Lucile, I keep making this mistake, I don't know why. I'll try to be more careful.
The distinction between separable and inseparable verbs makes perfect sense in German, where you have verbs like verstehen (understand) with inseparable prefix ver- which always stays in front of the root verb, and another sort of verbs such as anbieten (offrir) where the prefix an- can live an independent life under certain syntaxic circumstances: biete ... an, angeboten, etc...
In English as you rightly point out, there are phrasal verbs with particles such as 'pull up', where the 'up' never works as a preposition in that it never introduces a complement, and verbs which function with prepositions, such as look at (sth), look after (sb), where the preposition does its normal job of introducing a complement.
And you also have phrasal verbs with prepositions, such as 'come up with (sth)'...
However you find this analysis in terms of separable and inseparable all over the place, and it's in my opinion an extremely confusing way of accounting for these phenomena. Cheers

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Re: Phrasal verbs/wake up from traviskidd, posted on 19-08-2015 at 09:25:07 (D | E)
Hello melmoth (and everybody).
I don't know much about German, but English makes a clear distinction between prefixes and particles/prepositions. For example, there is a difference between "come over" and "overcome", "go under" and "undergo", "run out" and "outrun", "put in" and "input", and so forth. ("I don't understand why you want me to stand under a tree during a storm!" ) If it is a prefix in the infinitive then it is a prefix in every form and conjugation, and vice versa. My guess is that German is mostly like English, except that particles become prefixes in certain forms (such as the infinitive and past participle).
But this distinction is a bit different from the distinction between particles and prepositions, which is not so clear in English (and might be a bit clearer in German because of the prefixing of particles just mentioned). Sometimes it takes a bit of reflection to distinguish between the two ("run up a total" vs. "run up a hill" for example), hence this discussion.
See you.

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