We use phrases like “clean up”, “shut up”, “open up”, “close up”, etc., frequently. Perhaps because they’re so common, I never stopped to think why the “up” after the verb? It’s not at all clear to me what the origin of this usage is.
Any ideas?
They are called “Phrasal verbs”
Excellent, thank you. Never heard of the term before.
Your link is not working right now, but Googling on “phrasal verbs” gave a bunch of alternatives. Interestingly, many are English as a second language type sites. Must be a bugger to learn from scratch.
I think it’s a carry-over from our language’s Germanic ancestry.
I don’t speak German but I know they have verbs that in the infinitive look like “upgelooken” and then split in half in phrases like “Hans ist looken das telefon number up”, which is the formulation we encounter in English. What the typical English speaker doesn’t have any more is the clear sense that the verb consists of the two parts together (although the grammarians do) because we don’t see them reunified. You can soak it up, but you can’t as gramatically wish to upsoak more of it later.
Reader’s Digest (:eek:**) had a piece on the many uses of the word “up”, back when I was much younger and it was okay to read that publication. In many cases it has opposing uses like; shut-up and speak up; open up and close up.
And, for the sake of completeness, the little words (usually prepositions) you find after the main verb are known as “particles”.
Thank you, Psychonaut, for the sake of redundancy! 
Oops… guess I should completely read through the cite before posting next time.
In the case of phrasal verbs with up, I think they have an aspectual meaning. (The aspect of the verb indicates whether the action is completed or in progress, instantaneous or enduring, momentary or habitual, etc.) I think the use of up in the phrasal verbs you cited has a completive aspect. To clean up means to clean until no more cleaning needs to be done: you’ve completed the action.
In Hungarian the prefix fel- meaning ‘up’ also lends this aspect to verbs. For example, tölt means ‘to fill’; feltölt means ‘to fill up’ — i.e., pour in until there’s no more room to pour any more in. The action is completed, the aspect is completive.
This example, come to think of it, may be the origin of why up shows the completive aspect. Because of filling a container to the top, the contents rising up to the top at which point the filling action is completed.
I think I’ll second AHunter3’s explanation as plausible. I did study German and lived in Germany two years (I’m not fluent, though). “Two-part” verbs never gave me a problem because they’re so frequent in English. I remember we used to fake-say “upgepfukt” all of the time :).
These verb additions are modifications of the meaning of the main verb. In English, we can “sit.” Or we can “sit up” or “sit down,” for example. Dang, I can find my “501 Spanish Verbs” but the “501 German Verbs” seems to have gone missing – I seem to recall it had a great explanation of the German usage, which paralled English perfectly.
Well, Irish is not a Germanic language, but a lot of these “up” phrases can be translated into it word for word (the Irish word for “up” being suas) e.g.:
“to give up” - tabhair suas
“to speak up” - labhair suas
“to clean up” - glan suas
etc.
I always found that rather intriguing.
What about other, weird slang versions? Such as “word up”?
Though I’m a big fan of aspect, I don’t think it applies to phrasals. I say this becuse we can change the aspect w/o making a change to the particle. For example:
“We cleaned up.”
“We were cleaning up when…”
“I clean up.” (A maid’s response to what she does for a living)
“I clean up at five o’clock every day.” (A response regarding her schedule)
“We’re cleaning up.”
“We’re always cleaning up after the kids.”
*“We cleaned up all night.”
(However, it’s more than possible that I’m misunderstanding this whole thing and will have to do the ol’ forehead slap when Jomo points out how wrong I am.)
What about other, weird slang versions? Such as “word up”?
Ah, indeed. “Beat up” (or US English, “beat up on”); “shoot up” (= inject a drug) and “stitch up” (= frame for a crime).
The “up” and “down” forms seem to usually be intensifiers, carrying the rough meaning of “completely.” If the candle or the building burned, there might well be something left – the stub of the candle or the ruins of the building. But if the candle burned up or the building burned down, it suffered complete combustion, to the point that nothing burnable was left. “Open up” implies a complete opening, either physically or metaphorically. To clean up means to completely eliminate a mess, to clean thoroughly.
As was implied in the posts above, it is often true that they have idiomatic meaning – to “shut up” is usually not “to shut completely” (though this meaning can occur, as in “Before we left for our month’s vacation, we shut up (=secured) the house and cancelled all deliveries”), but rather to cease speaking altogether.
Jomo, I’ve always seen aspect in English as expressed in the perfect tenses, parallel to how it functions in the Slavic languages, and am less than comfortable with the idea that the phrasal verbs often carry aspectual meaning. Would you care to expound a bit further on how you see this in them?
English does not have a regular system for making verb aspect, the way some languages do. But there do exist constructions, like this one, where aspect is implied.
Think—what is the difference between to clean and to clean up? The former is indeterminate as to how much cleaning happens. The latter implies cleaning until there’s nothing more to clean. I would call this completive aspect, as an accurate, concise way to tell the difference between the two expressions.
Coileán, you cited examples of various verb tenses, but I wasn’t talking about tense. Aspect can work for a verb in any tense. You can say “I’ll clean up my room tomorrow” and still mean that you plan to get the job done.
jomo,
Though I agree with your interpretation of the phase, I’m still hesitant to call it an aspectual difference. Instead, I would say it’s a difference in telicity. Telic referring to those processes seen as having a natural point of completion, atelic being undefined. As I said before my preference for this term is rooted in the fact that we can produce aspectual changes w/o any changes to the particle. To go back to one of my examples:
“We cleaned up.” --simple past
“We were cleaning up when…” --past progressive
However, at the end of the day I think we’re talking about the same thing, just using different words to describe it.
…or, as in “O Brother Where Art Thou?”
She loved him up…
That one kills me!
I’m sorry, but poor grammar is something up with which I shall not put…
Barry