Delahunty and Garvey
Two other potential problems for students derive from the ability of many
of these words to occur as particles (25a), and as adverbs, modifiers of verbs
(25b).
(25) a. I called my sister up.
b. I looked up.
Let’s consider the complexities of the word down using the following
sentences as our data:
(26) a. I cut down the tree.
b. I fell down the hill.
c. I cut the tree down.
d. I fell the hill down.
e. Down the tree I cut.
f. Down the hill I fell.
g. I cut it down
h. I fell it down.
i. I cut down it.
j. I fell down it.
Sentences (26a, b) appear to be parallel because in both, down appears before
the NPs the tree and the hill. However, this parallelism is broken in (26c, d). In
(26c) down is grammatical after the NP, but in (26d) it is not. This difference
in behavior suggests that down may represent two different parts of speech in
these sentences. Semantically, we sense an idiomatic unity in cut down that we
do not sense in fell down. In fact, cut down could be replaced by one word:
toppled or felled. On formal and semantic grounds, then, down seems to rep-
resent different parts of speech in (26a) and (26b). The fact that down the hill
seems to have moved as a single unit in (26f) suggests that in that and related
sentences, down is a preposition heading a prepositional phrase. For down in
(26a), we have no ready-made traditional label. In such sentences we will call
it a particle, using a term coined recently by linguists, and verb + particle
combinations like cut down, look up we will call phrasal verbs.
Next, consider the word down in the sentences below:
(27) a. I fell down the hill.
b. I fell down.
Assuming that down is a true preposition in (27a), we note in (27b) that