WAG here, but I’d say it’s hurry up because it corresponds to an increase in speed. “Speed up” makes perfect sense because you’re raising your level of speed, and “hurry up” seems to be a parrallel to this.
Those 2-word verbs sure are funny, ain’t they? Like:
Carrying on (a conversation)
Carrying out (a plan)
Don’t have anything to do with carrying a suitcase.
For non-speakers, the only way to learn them is rote memorization. It’s difficult, but at least it can be done.
Now the REAL problem is when the same verb means 2 things , which are exactly the opposite
of each other: like go off
When a light goes off, it stops working, But when a burglar alarm goes off, it starts working. Try 'splaining that to the student you’re tutoring.
Yeah. You can try to come up with an explanation, but I doubt you’ll find one that’s really satisfactory. These things don’t follow any particular rules.
It’s not as arbitrary as it first appears. Car alarms, alarm clocks, and bombs also ‘go off’…in short, the rule of thumb seems to be that loud, sudden, and annoying or dangerous things ‘go off’ when they start working, while lightbulbs and certain other appliances ‘go off’ when they stop working.
“Go off” is a case like “hurry up” vs. “hurry down”. I’d have to say that when it means “explode,” it’s a phrasal verb, since the meaning can’t be deduced from the parts; but when it means “be extinguished” (or for that matter “rot”), it’s more of a verb phrase with an adjective complement (like “go pale,” etc.)
Phrasal verbs are a law to themselves. They have lots of weird syntactic ways they behave (they’re the best refutation to the fake ending-sentences-with-prepositions rule; try “correcting” “How much can she put up with?”), and their meaning cannot be deduced from the parts, usually (such as “put up with,” again).
Of course, that said, “hurry up” isn’t much of a phrasal verb, since the meaning can be deduced from the sum of its parts, and since “up” isn’t a preposition.
“Up” often denotes an increase, intensification, or completion of the verb (spruce up, smarten up, speed up, tally up, eat up) and can even be used productively.
All right, while all of that’s helpful (if placing me in the position of answering the kid’s questions with either ‘who knows?’ or ‘because’) let me take a slightly different approach:
Is there a history to the phrase ‘hurry up’ that would explain how it entered the language? It’s an oddity that may have just grown organically but it’s possible that there’s a true origin out there somewhere.
Up is basically an intensifier in this usage. “Hurry up” is a more urgent command than mere “hurry.” English is filled with intensifiers of this sort.
A discussion of intensifiers and how they come to form parts of words can be found in the excellent The Unfolding of Language: An Evolutionary Tour of Mankind’s Greatest Invention, by Guy Deutscher.
“Up” isn’t a preposition? “The cat climbed up the tree.” It certainly looks like a preposition in that sentence.
Are you sure that “up” can be paired with verbs productively? That would be a reasonable argument that “hurry up” isn’t a phrasal verb, but I can’t come up with any examples that don’t sound really strained at best.
In which example? In many analyses of phrasal verbs, the particle is considered neither an adverb nor a preposition (though I believe the recent and very well-reputed Cambridge Grammar of the English Language, no doubt alongside many other grammars, does actually treat them as prepositions.) In that case, it seems circular and somewhat illogical to say “This isn’t a phrasal verb because it’s not a preposition.” Otherwise, do you mean to say it’s not a preposition because it doesn’t have a complement? Because, again, the particles of phrasal verbs quite often don’t, so I guess I still don’t understand how it matters.
