pre-course task, haalp!

[regimechange]

Hi there,

The course I'm applying to has given me an enormous pre-interview task to do and whilst I can confidently approach most of the questions, I've found a few (admittedly basic) parts of the task to be quite perplexing. Please see below and comment if you can:

1) Sentence parts - in the below sentence, what is the word "down"? Is it a preposition? Or perhaps it is part of the adverb "quickly" as in "quickly down"? I am really stuck with this one.

'He ran quickly down the stairs'

2) Sentence parts again - What is the word "from" in the below sentence

'She disappeared from my sight'

Responses would be much appreciated

[Jo]

down = preposition in this sentence

Note the potential confusion for a learner with the phrasal verb to run down as in "The president ran down the country" or "The president ran the country down."

from = preposition in all sentences

[regimechange]

Thanks TN, that's what I thought.

Weirdly enough, I'm supposed to take the sentence apart and put each word under their grammatical categories in a table, yet there is no 'preposition' column. That's what threw me off!

I'm actually a bit concerned about the quality of the course now, especially as in the beginning of the document there is a sentence that goes: "You may refer to a dictionary and a grammar."

Sigh..

[regimechange]

I just thought, is the phrase "disappeared from" not a phrasal verb?

[Jo]

No, there is no phrasal verb to disappear from.

Just as a very general guide, phrasal verbs tend to be Germanic in origin (short, mono-syllabic, not to say guttural).

Disappear is French in origin (disparaître). See this for a brief history:
http://www.englishclub.com/english-language-history.htm

[regimechange]

Just as a very general guide, phrasal verbs tend to be Germanic in origin (short, mono-syllabic, not to say guttural).

Disappear is French in origin (disparaître)

Brilliant. Thanks for that TN