How English builds meaning out of small parts: phrasal verbs, prefixes and suffixes, collocations, and picking the more precise word.
English does a lot of its work with short words stuck together. Pick up, put off, get by — the verb and the particle mean nothing much apart, and something specific together. The same instinct runs through prefixes, suffixes and the word pairs that native speakers always use in the same combination. These articles cover the machinery, so a phrase you have never seen still makes sense the first time you meet it.
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