Omzinesý wrote: ↑27 Aug 2019 14:50Ser wrote: ↑26 Aug 2019 08:47This is fine if it's about the writing system, but these interpretations have different pronunciations. Adverbs are more strongly stressed.
In phrasal verbs too?
How do you define the term "phrasal verb"? Different authors use very different definitions.
At one extreme, some authors say that any verb that lexically determines an accompanying preposition or adverb counts as a "phrasal verb" (so, "go to the post office", "believe in somebody", "turn left", "run down the mountain", "give up one's aspirations", "come up with a new idea"...). And at the other extreme, the term is reserved for verbs that lexically determine an adverb with a resulting idiomatic usage that is "unpredictable" from the constituent words (so, "give up one's aspirations" and "come up with a new idea", but not the previous four other examples).
eldin raigmore wrote: ↑28 Aug 2019 04:51One of the reasons I took such a long hiatus in participating on CONLANG-L was that when I analyzed “believe in” as a two-part verb, Ray Brown came down so heavily on me.
So you should be warned that, while indecision and confusion and equivocation and ambivalence about this, is probably the current state of knowledge, there will be people (who are not crackpots) who are very passionate about each side of the debate. And that there is, in fact, a debate.
Personally I see that as a philosophical failure on Ray Brown's part though, since, as you describe it, you and him simply had a semantic dispute over what can count as a "verb".
The topic is certainly more interesting than that, especially in light of the Indo-European development of adverbs into both prepositions and derivational prefixes (giving birth to e.g. the separable verbs of German and the directional verbs of Latin). I can easily imagine applying parallel reinterpretations of adpositions into verbal affixes in conlangs, e.g. (in a language with OV order and postpositions):
[Old Just-made-up-ese]
ke-ər pə yalu-m
2SG-ACC in believe-1SG
'I believe in you, I put my hope in you'
evolves into:
[New Just-made-up-ese]
ker pyalo-n
2SG.ACC trust-1SG
'I trust you'
The lexically-determined selection of
pə 'in' with
yalu 'to believe' in Old Just-made-up-ese gradually gets reinterpreted as a "two-part" verb that then becomes the "one-part" verb
pyalo in New Just-made-up-ese.