Introduction The course paper is dedicated to the study of the syntax and semantic features of phrasal verbs in the English language

1.4. Compound verbs
In linguistics, a compound verb or complex predicate is a multi-word compound that functions as a single verb. One component of the compound is a light verb or vector, which carries any inflections, indicating tense, mood or aspect, but provides only fine shades of meaning. The other, primary, component is a verb or a noun which carries most of the semantics of the compound, and determines its arguments. It is usually in either base or [in V+V compounds] conjunctive participial form.
A compound verb is also called a “complex predicate” because the semantics, as formally modeled by a predicate, is determined by the primary verb, though both verbs appear in the surface form. Whether Noun+Verb (N+V) compounds are considered to be “compound verbs” is amatter of naming convention.
The common devices for verb-making in Modern English are: 1) affixation, 2) conversion, 3) verb-adverb combination, 4) backformation, 5) composition. A special interest attaches to such single linguistic units as: bring up, break up, come in, go down, get over, get up, get out, make out, make up, etc³. In actual speech they may appear with their two parts following each other or separated by one or more other elements of the structure of which they are a part. Formations of this kind are not recognised as single grammatical units by all grammarians; some call them "verb-adverb combinations". They have also been called "separable verbs", "merged verbs", "separable compounds", "compound verbs" and "poly-word verbs". There seems no small justification for adopting W. N. Francis' term "separable verbs" which is meant to bring out both grammatical qualities of these verbs: a) that they function as single parts of speech, and b) that their two parts may be separated from each other by intervening elements.
Such verbs, though often colloquial, add an idiomatic power to the language and enable it to express various subtle distinctions of thought and meaning. A great many modern verbs have been coined after this pattern: to boil down, to go under, to hang on, to back down, to own up, to take over, to run across, to take up, etc. It is to be noted that figurative combinations of this type express a verbal idea more forcibly and more picturesquely than the literal word-combination. Example: drive away = banish; come about =happen; come by = acquire; fall out = disagree; give in = yield; keep on = continue; look after = tend; pass out = faint; pull out — depart. Observations of the idiomatic character of separable verbs and their stylistic value give every reason to say that they possess, as A.G. Kennedy has it, "a certain amount of warmth and colour and fire which the colder, more impersonal, more highly specialised simple verb lacks". As such they are commoner in colloquial than in other varieties of English. "The student may learn grammar and, with time, acquire an adequate vocabulary, but without a working knowledge of such idioms as to get up, to look up, to look through, to look over, to call on, to call for, to get on, to get along, to make up, to make for, etc., his speech remains awkward and stilted"⁴. In English grammar of conventional type the adverbial formative element in such compound verbs is often called "a preposition-like adverb". But there seems no small justification for adopting the term "postposition" to supersede the former. Among postpositions the following are most productive: about, away, down, forth, in, off, over, out and up. There are important treatments of the question made by Y. Zhluktenko where these separable elements are referred to as postpositional morphemes: a) verbs with postpositional morphemes retaining their primary local meaning: come in, go out, go down; b) verbs with postpositional morphemes having a figurative meaning: boil down, take off; c) verbs with postpositional morphemes intensifying the verb or imparting the perfective sense to its meaning, e. g.: eat up, rise up; d) verbs whose meaning can hardly be derived from their separable component parts, e. g.: bear out, give in, turn up. It is interesting to note that English verbs with homonymic prefixes and postpositions will always differ in their meaning.