Grammar: Groups & phrases: Verb group: Structure of the verb group

Phrasal verbs

Verb + adverb

Many phrasal verbs are formed with adverbs such as ahead, apart, aside, away, back, forward, home, in front, out etc:  

Phrasal verbs comprising verb + adverb do not require a following noun group, unlike verb + preposition, eg Barney went for the stranger (attacked). However, sometimes a phrasal verb + adverb may have a second Participant, eg Granny Gong tipped off the police (notified).  

Verbs with two Participants are traditionally called 'transitive' verbs . In cases where a phrasal verb + adverb has two Participants, the particle seems to function like a preposition rather than an adverb. Many prepositions may also function as adverbs of space or location (sometimes called 'prepositional adverbs'): about, above, across, after, along, around, by, down, in, off, on, out, over, past, round, through, under, up etc. However, in these cases, making such a distinction between adverb and preposition is of little practical value to the learner of English. Here are some examples of phrasal verbs with one Participant, formed with particles that could function either as prepositions or as adverbs:

More important than the distinction between preposition and adverb is whether a combination of verb + adverb is a phrasal verb (with the meaning of a single lexical verb) or a 'free combination' of verb + adverb where both retain their own distinctive meaning:

Here past and across are adverbs similar to a preposition of direction. The most reliable (although not perfect) test for deciding whether such a combination is a phrasal verb or not is to substitute first the verb and then the adverb: instead of wade, we could say walk across, run across, swim across and instead of across, we could say wade in, wade through, wade over, wade up, wade down. This shows that the combination wade across is a free combination, and not a phrasal verb. 

It is also usually not possible to separate verb and adverb in a phrasal verb by inserting the modifying adverb right (or sometimes straight) between them whereas we can do this in a free combination of verb and adverb:

Kitty turned right up. ['arrived' = phrasal verb]   ? Dotty passed right out. ['fainted' = phrasal verb]  Ricky walked right past. [free combination]

However, this test is less reliable since some phrasal verbs seem to accept such a separation of verb and adverb, eg Dotty passed right out is acceptable to many speakers whereas Kitty turned right up is unacceptable to all speakers. 

Note that the term Participant is written with a capital to remind us that it is a functional term.