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The families of the MH370 passengers in Kuala Lumpur huddled in conference rooms at a hotel. Selamat Omar, a 60-year-old Malaysian whose son was on the missing aircraft, prepared himself for bad news. "I am sad, but as a Muslim I accept what has happened," he said as he waited for news of his 29-year-old son, Mohamad Khirul Amri, a passenger employed by a private jet company as an engineer . He was traveling to Beijing to work on an aircraft in need of repair.

How to judge "work on " as a phrasal verb or a verb plus a preposition?

user48070
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3 Answers3

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In contemporary grammar the term phrasal verb has two somewhat different meanings.

  1. In one meaning the term names any idiomatic combination of a verb and a preposition or locative/directive adverb whose meaning cannot be understood from the ordinary senses of the words involved.

    Under this meaning, work on would be called a ‘phrasal verb’ here, because on an aircraft does not have its ordinary sense of telling you where Mohamad Khirul Amri was to work. It tells you what object is affected by his work, just as if work on were an ordinary transitive verb:

    He repaired the aircraft.
    He flew the aircraft.
    He worked on the aircraft.

    This meaning is current mostly among teachers of English as a foreign/second language (and is not used by all of them).

  2. The other meaning restricts the term to combinations of a verb and a ‘particle’—again, a preposition or locative/directive adverb—with specific syntactic characteristics:

    • The particle can be moved after a very ‘light’ (short) direct object, and must be moved after a pronoun:

      okShe worked up a detailed presentation.
      okShe worked up the presentation. OR okShe worked the presentation up.
      okShe worked it up. BUT NOT  ∗She worked up it.

    • The particle cannot be ‘pied-piped’ with wh- relatives to the front of a clause:

      okThis is the presentation which she worked up. BUT NOT
       ∗This is the presentation up which she worked.

    Under this meaning, work on would not be called a ‘phrasal verb’ here, because on does not have this movement pattern:

     ∗He was traveling to Beijing to work it on.
    okThis is the aircraft on which he was to work.

    This meaning is the one used by most general linguists. An equivalent term is particle verb.

So the answer really depends on how your teacher uses the term phrasal verb.

StoneyB on hiatus
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Section "I. Definition of the Phrasal Verb and Similar Concepts" answers your question, but do read the entire page. All bolds are mine:

A phrasal verb in Present-Day English is a verb that takes a complementary particle, in other words, an adverb resembling a preposition, necessary to complete a sentence. A common example is the verb “to fix up”: “He fixed up the car.” The word “up” here is a particle, not a preposition, because “up” can move: “He fixed the car up.” This movement of the particle “up” quickly distinguishes it from the preposition “up”.

Because the forms of the particle and the preposition are themselves identical, it is easy to confuse phrasal verbs with a very similar-looking type of verb: the prepositional verb. A prepositional verb takes a complementary prepositional phrase. Movement verbs are readily identifiable examples. For example, the verb “to go” is intransitive, and without the benefit of context, it cannot operate in a complete sentence only accompanied by a subject. One cannot say, “I went,” and expect to satisfy a listener without including a prepositional phrase of place, such as “I went to the store.”

Prepositional verbs are immediately distinguishable from phrasal verbs in terms of movement, as prepositions cannot move after their objects. It is not possible to say, “I went the store to,” and so “went” is a prepositional verb. There are, in fact, several syntactic tests to distinguish phrasal from prepositional verbs, and these will be discussed in detail in the final section. It is also necessary to understand that the term “verb phrase” refers not to phrasal verbs, but more generally to a sentence verb, its complements, and matters of tense, aspect, mood, voice and so on.

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'To work on' is different in meaning to 'to work'. So, in this case, I would say that is a phrasal verb.

MMJZ
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