Noncompositional

In the March 19th issue of the Economist, there is an article “Kamikaze Politics” about political scandals in Japan, which has the following two sentences.

At midweek a new deputy governor, Masaaki Shirakawa, looked likely, at least for a while, to fill the vacuum—an unnecessary one, since candidates acceptable to both sides have been there for the choosing all along, notably Haruhiko Kuroda, head of the Asian Development Bank. By not putting him forward, Mr Fukuda showed himself unable and unwilling even to pick up the phone to the opposition.

Pick up the phone to? What’s that?

A cursory examination of google search results indicates that this seems to be a UK and Australian thing to say. If it happens in America, I’ve certainly never heard it. It’s a nice example of a multiword expression. What’s interesting is that it’s a communication verb that incorporates the means of communication (like phone, fax, email, and write) but which, perhaps due to syntax of the words in the expression, requires the person called to be expressed with the preposition to (like talk, speak, and write).

(yes, write goes in both places: I write (letters) to my aunt every week, but I write my uncle every month)

It seems like one of those things that keeps getting “casually discovered”–that is, that I hear mention of at least once a year–is the result of applying the agentive -er suffix to particle verbs like pick up and clean out. What’s interesting is that the most common result (according to some study [studies? -I've only seen a 1978 manuscript by Moira Yip cited wrt this issue]) is picker upper and cleaner outer. There are some interesting observations made by David Mortensen in this post of his now archive-only blog.

But how about this: what do you do with take advantage of? Well, today, I somewhat consciously produced taker advantage ofer. A quick search on Google reveals:

Kira I Am: does it say that kkira is the numbe rone drunk girl taker advantage ofer? link

Yes! This seems to be a one-line extract from some sort of IRC or similar chat session. I especially like the semantic undergoer expressed as a pre-modifier.

In any case, this seems like an interesting test case for models of realizational morphology, as there is more than just a head verb and a particle. Exactly which bits of the word are eligible for the morphological process?