To be fair, I suppose I am a bit of a ham – a strictly vegetarian sort of ham, that is …

(Please excuse me a moment)

Just flipping back there, you’ll notice that “weigh in” has no object so you could show it as 2 boxes (of the same colour) together. Oh, and “flipping back” is a similar set-up although it could conceivably be used transitively so there is a small chance of a block of another colour making an appearance and, if there were to be one, it could go in the middle between the other two bits because it’s a phrasal and not a prepositional verb – flip IT back. Wait a minute, I said “set-up” back there, didn’t I? So does that mean that mult-word verbs can morph into nouns? Yes it does, although the word stess changes as in –

“They broke UP last week” but “Have you heard about their BREAK up?”

(Now, where was I?)

Ah yes… those pesky Normans… well, they brought us a lot of things but they didn’t bring us multi-word verbs. We already had them. Loads of them. They did have a meteoric effect on the language of those little islands, though. They enhanced our vocabulary, for a start, which is why it’s so huge and full of subtle nuances. We can blame the unpredictability of English spelling on their arrival too. Just think if they’d left us alone and we might be speaking something akin to modern Scandinavian languages now, which would make it easier for us to spell as well as to chat up hot Norwegian blokes.

Ah well, the weekend’s nearly here and so I do hope you’ll all be listening carefully to Julia Gillard’s use of multi-word verbs over the next couple of days. I look forward to a full report the next time I see you.

In the meantime, do you think perhaps I should *get out more?

* “get out” is, of course, intransitive in this case and so you will only need 2 boxes of the same colour to show its pattern ……….

Ah but I’m sure you already know all that. You’re so open to exploring unfamiliar concepts and have been for every one of these past 9 weeks that you don’t eally need me to tell you that. You’re really just talking about getting in a tizzy about the fact that it was a sort of test, I guess and in the event that was…. well, it wasn’t all that bad, was it?

Now you leave those poor albatrosses alone – in fact, why not celebrate your success by flinging them a few toast crumbs?

As Captain, I guess you get to decide on the rum rations so perhaps you could allow yourself an extra tot by way of compensation

xo

What does it mean?

Well it means everything to do with pronunciation that goes above (supra) the little parts (segmental). in other words, it’s not just about phonemes but about where we place the stress in a sentence to reflect our meaning, how intonation can show the intention, mood, meaning etc of the speaker. All that sort of thing.

Easy, innit?