phrasal verb

plural phrasal verbs

1. human sciencesA two-word verb, consisting of a verb and a "small" adverb or particle, that has an idiomatic meaning not easily predictable from the individual parts.

   In 'The police told the driver to pull over', 'pull over' is a phrasal verb.

   1 more example

   In every section of this invaluable work new light is thrown on ancient problems - phrasal verbs (bring up, put off), phrasal-prepositional verbs (catch up on, come up with) [...] duratives, sentence adverbs, and so on.

   1985, Robert Burchfield, The English Language, Oxford: Oxford University Press, page 156

2. more looselyhuman sciencesA phrase, consisting of a verb with a preposition and/or adverb, that has idiomatic meaning.

   1 more example

   Thus, it would seem that as far as GAPPING is concerned, the whole expression put off is somehow treated as a single 'compound Verb'. But this is the very intuition which we encapsulated in analysis (125) (b), by giving the sequence [put off] the status of a single V constituent (i.e. by analysing it as a Phrasal Verb). Thus, facts about GAPPING lend yet further support to analysis (125).

   1988, Andrew Radford, Transformational grammar: a first course, Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, page 98