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.

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.