Paula Rodríguez Puente – lecturer in the department of English, French and German philology at the University of Oviedo and member of the LINGUO research group – has received the Young Researchers Award from the European Society for the Study of English, under the English Language & Linguistics field of study, for her paper "The English Phrasal Verb, 1650-Present. History, Stylistic Drifts, and Lexicalisation" (2019), published by Cambridge University Press. This is the second award for this work, which was previously recognised with the Leocadio Martín Mingorance Prize by the Asociación Española de Estudios Anglo-Norteamericanos (Spanish Association of Anglo-American Studies).

This award-winning work is based on her doctoral thesis, defended at the University of Santiago de Compostela in 2013, which traces the historical development of phrasal verbs in English (for example: give up meaning abandon; fall out meaning argue) from the Early Modern English period (1500-1700) to the present day, thus covering almost 400 years of its history. This is an empirical study based on more than 12,000 examples of actual usage taken from various bodies of linguistic work, providing an exhaustive description of the most outstanding characteristics of this complex class of verbs.

The innovative aspect of this publication is that it is based on a vast number of actual examples that are used to analyse in detail a variety of aspects of their history that had not previously been explored. These included the nature of the particles and verbs that make up a phrasal verb and their morphological and semantic characteristics, with different classifications being put forward based on the meaning that particles adopt depending on the verb with which they are combined, and on the basis of their historical development.

The author demonstrates, among other things, that there are different degrees of fusion between a verb and its particle depending on the degree of lexicalisation of the combination, as well as different levels of idiomatisation (the taking on of meanings that cannot be derived from the meanings of the verb and the particle when used alone).

In addition to clarifying matters relating to their semantic, syntactic and morphological aspects, the analysis of the corpus shows how these verbs vary according to the register in which they are used. For this, the researcher used actual samples from ten different genres: dramatic texts, fiction, travel diaries, personal diaries, personal letters, medical texts, news, scientific texts, sermons and trial transcripts.

The research offers new details about these constructions through their historical development, which in turn will facilitate better understanding and learning of them on the part of students and research staff.