phrasal verbs VS verbs with prepositions

[GhotiO |fɪʃ|]

How do you decide if it's a phrasal verb or simply a verb with a preposition?

For example,
is "look for" a phrasal verb or simply a verb with a preposition?
is "look at" a phrasal verb or simply a verb with a preposition?

 

[Tarheel]

I don't think we ever use "look" by itself. It's always with a preposition of some sort. (Maybe not always, but usually, yes )

 

[jutfrank]

This is very tricky but you have to approach this by thinking about meaning. If you remove the preposition and replace it with a different preposition and the verb still seems to have the same meaning, then it isn't a phrasal verb.

look at my cat
look in the mirror
look to the left

In all three cases, the verb 'look' has the same meaning, so none of the above bold combinations count as phrasal verbs.

look up a word.

Here, the verb doesn't seem to have the same meaning, so it counts as a phrasal verb. It makes some sense to think of 'look up' as a verb and 'a word' as its object.

Grammatically, a good test is whether the two words can be separated. As a test, try it with a short pronoun such as 'it'.

look it up

This is okay, providing further evidence that 'look up' is a phrasal verb, where the meaning is about consulting a reference text like a dictionary, for example.

 

[GhotiO |fɪʃ|]

Great answer! Now I understand. Thank you

 

[5jj]

You can read more about such verb + preposition/particle compounds here: https://www.usingenglish.com/articles/phrasal-verbs-multiword-verbs.html

 

[Skrej]

Grammatically, a good test is whether the two words can be separated. As a test, try it with a short pronoun such as 'it'.
look it up

That doesn't account for inseparable and intransitive phrasal verbs, though.

Another test (again not always 100% reliable) is whether the verb+preposition combination creates an idiomatic meaning that you wouldn't arrive at by looking at the individual words.

 

[jutfrank]

That doesn't account for inseparable and intransitive phrasal verbs, though.

Yes, right.

Another test (again not always 100% reliable) is whether the verb+preposition combination creates an idiomatic meaning that you wouldn't arrive at by looking at the individual words.

Yes, that's what I was trying to say in post #3.

 

[Flask]

One helpful test to see how "wedded" a preposition is to the verb it follows is to try separating the two in a cleft sentence or a question and see whether the sense of the verb + preposition is retained or lost:

He looked at his cat.
At what did he look? -- His cat.
It was at his cat that he looked.

He looked for his cat.
(?) For what did he look? --His cat.
(?) It was for his cat that he looked.

Though I expect all four of the derived sentences to be dismissed as unnatural, I think that perhaps the native speakers here will agree that the sense of look at is at least preserved in the question and the cleft sentence, and that the sense of look for is either lost or strained to the breaking point in the question and cleft sentence. Indeed, in the cleft sentence It was for his cat that he looked, it almost sounds as if he looked (at something) on behalf of his cat!

Whatever terminology we adopt, it would appear that for is more closely wedded to look in look for than at is to look in look at. That is, grammatically, it would appear that look for forms a tighter verbal unit than look at. Consider, too, that the question Where did he look? could be answered with the prepositional phrase At his cat, but that the same question could not be answered with For his cat. The question needs to be What did he look for?