Teasing out the meaning of 'out'

International audience; Transitive phrasal verbs with the particle "out", "PV out", exhibit an intriguing variety of semantic combinations. The semantic properties of "PV out" can range from fully transparent to idiomatic entailing a spectrum of aspectual features, ranging from inchoative to exhaustive and varying degrees of intensification (Bolinger 1971, Fraser 1976, Brinton 1985, Svenonius 1996, Jackendoff 2002, Tyler and Evans 2003, Machonis 2009). While Machonis (2009) argued that compositional PV’s with "up" appear to vary from aspectual precision to stylistic concerns and even help with disambiguation, this study attempts to ascertain the various meanings associated with the particle out. We therefore constructed an exhaustive lexicon-grammar (Maurice Gross 1994) of 504 purely transitive "PV out" expressions indicating a continuum of 10 semantic features systematically characterized for the meanings that apply to individual phrasal verbs.