Saturday 11 May 2019

Diagnostic For Phrasal Verbs

Halliday & Matthiessen (2014: 417):
There will often be doubt about whether these complex lexical items can be interpreted grammatically as a single Process or not. In such cases it is important to consider the transitivity of the clause as a whole, to see whether it appears to be structured as process plus participant or process plus circumstance. Thematic variation often shows a preference one way or the other.