Some multiword verbs like run into ‘encounter’ in She ran into a friend have been called by two distinct names in the literature. They are prepositional verbs (with a fixed and specified preposition) or (inseparable or nonseparable) transitive phrasal verbs. This paper argues that this different use of terminology for the same multiword verbs actually reveals the nature of the whole class they belong to. The class is a cline of grammatical elements and properties between prepositional verbs and transitive phrasal verbs, and the set shared by these two subclasses is the locus of that cline. This characteristic mode of the cline is explained in terms of intersective constructional gradience and multiple inheritance.

It has been generally assumed that phrasal verbs in English are primitive in nature, either as a base form or as a derived form. Even the latest studies posit that the alternative surface forms of a transitive phrasal verb such as take out in take the trash out and take out the trash are constructed from that phrasal verb itself by verb movement. This paper argues that phrasal verbs are not purely primitives but possibly derivatives. They can be derived from their reverse combinations, what we call particle verbs. The paper supports this argument by examining a set of transitive particle verbs in English, e.g. downplay in downplay the incident. It also uses the notion of verb movement and proposes a unified analysis of both the particle verbs and their V-P alternants such as play down the incident and play the incident down.

This paper aims to develop a derivational approach to the syntactic alternation of English transitive phrasal verbs such as take out the rubbish and take the rubbish out. It is argued that these two alternative verb phrases (VP) are equally derived from their more primitive rule or construction. This construction is often called ‘complex verb (or predicate)’ and notated as [V V P]. The complex verb structure interacts with the standard VP-shell structure through the canonical verb movement to yield the two alternative forms. The paper also offers suggestions for other issues that arise from the suggested analysis.