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# The Modern English Verb-Adverb Combination (Stanford University Publications, Language and Literature, vol. 1, no. 1, 1920)

**Authors:** Arthur Garfield Kennedy · **Year:** 1920 · **Venue:** Stanford University Publications, University Series, Language and Literature, vol. 1, no. 1 (published by Stanford University) **Link:** [archive.org/details/modernenglishve00kenngoog](https://archive.org/details/modernenglishve00kenngoog) · **Licence:** [public domain](https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/mark/1.0/) (author died 1954; published 1920, public domain in the US)

grammar-book[licence](https://archive.org/details/modernenglishve00kenngoog)

- [Publisher's page](https://archive.org/details/modernenglishve00kenngoog)
- [PDF](https://archive.org/download/modernenglishve00kenngoog/modernenglishve00kenngoog.pdf)

**Authors (1)**

1. Arthur Garfield Kennedy

Citations and author metrics from OpenAlex (); authors with the same name are not always told apart.

## What it is about

The study describes combinations of a verb with one of sixteen prepositional adverbs (about, across, around, at, by, down, for, in, off, on, out, over, through, to, up, with). The author collected more than nine hundred combinations with several thousand meanings from novels, plays, dictionaries and everyday speech. He sorts the particles by meaning: direction (up, out), removal (off, out), completion (up in the perfective sense), and figurative use. A survey of Old English and Middle English texts shows that combinations were rare before the fifteenth century (Beowulf, first 300 lines: 25 verbs with an inseparable prefix, 5 combinations) and grew in the later periods. Of 826 combinations examined, only 97 have a verb of two or more syllables, and most of those end in weak syllables. The particle is most often "up" (more than twice as many combinations as "out").

## Ideas

- I1. Parse particles as the UD relation `compound:prt`, and test `en parse-eval` on the particle attachment in UD EWT (labelled attachment for these tokens only). The sixteen particles listed here give a closed set to count.
- I2. Use the pronoun rule: a pronoun object goes between the verb and the particle ("hunted him out"), while a noun object may follow the particle. Put this as a rule in `en/src/lin.rs` and measure the word-order accuracy on UD sentences that contain a particle verb.
- I3. Store the meaning group of each verb-particle pair (directional, removal, completive, perfective, figurative) as a lexicon table in `world/src/dictionary.rs`. Then the school student can say whether "pick up" in a sentence is literal or figurative, and give the reason from the table.
- I4. Keep the figurative/literal split as a counted check: for a sample of combinations, count how often the literal reading and the figurative one appear in a corpus slice. The author's own warning is that one verb can have both readings.

## For Mova

Chapters: [13. Verbs](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/languages/en/13-verbs/) (verb particles), [19. The lexicon: vocabulary, multiword expressions and register](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/languages/en/19-lexicon-mwe-register/) (multiword verbs and their meaning), [22. Phrases: noun, adjective, adverb and prepositional phrases](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/languages/en/22-phrases/) (particle phrases), [18. Compounding, conversion and the minor processes](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/languages/en/18-compounding-conversion-minor/) (where particle verbs are discussed in the grammar). Code: `en/src/lin.rs` (word order), `en/src/dict.rs` and `world/src/dictionary.rs` (the lexicon of combinations), `en parse-eval` for the `compound:prt` measure. Measures: attachment accuracy on UD EWT particle tokens; word-order accuracy on particle-verb sentences; school student answers on literal vs figurative items. Run twice to check the output is identical.

## Cite

The paper itself, not this card. BibTeX from the library's record of the work.

```
@book{kennedy1920modern,
  title = {{The Modern English Verb-Adverb Combination (Stanford University Publications, Language and Literature, vol. 1, no. 1, 1920)}},
  author = {Kennedy, Arthur Garfield},
  year = {1920},
  url = {https://archive.org/details/modernenglishve00kenngoog}
}
```

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