The following sentence is just one of those sentences which cause problem to me.
The form you would look for if you were looking the word up in a dictionary.
Why has up been placed so far away from looking in the above sentence? They should be put together since looking up is a phrasal verb.
Couldn't that sentence be written as:
The form you would look for if you were looking up the word in a dictionary.
The form you would look for if you were looking the word up in a dictionary.
Why has up been placed so far away from looking in the above sentence? They should be put together since looking up is a phrasal verb.
Couldn't that sentence be written as:
The form you would look for if you were looking up the word in a dictionary.
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Comments
look up,ıntransitive,to get better: Things are looking up since her coming as a surgeon to our hospital.
look sb up, transitive, to visit someone: I am planning to look my grandmother up in the afternoon.
look something up, transitive,to find information in a book on a computer etc.Don't ask me!!!Look that word up in your dictionary.
separable or inseparable. In most cases the phrases must simply
be memorized.
If a two-part verb is separable (as 'look up' is separable in your sentence), then you can say either 'look the word up' OR 'look up the word'.
However, when you use a pronoun with a separable two-part verb, then you must separate the verb. So, if you replace 'word' with 'it' in your sentence, then 'it' must be between the two parts of the verb:
look the word up --> OK
look it up --> OK
look up the word --> OK
look up it --> WRONG
Here is a link with a list of separable, inseparable and intransitive two-part verbs:
http://owl.english.purdue.edu/handouts/esl/eslphrasal.html
If it is even then Bokeh is wrong because he is calling look up an idiomatic phrase. This is not an idiomatic phrase.
Phrasal verbs can also consist of more than two words. For example, look forward to and look down on
These are not separable.
BTW here is another sentence which uses separable two-part verb:
When you set the adjective clauses off with commas, you are indicating that the clause is not essential to identify the word it modifies.
Therefore, I agree that every idiom is a phrase but not every phrase is an idiom. I don't think that all phrasal verbs can also be called idiomatic.