German, Dutch, Yiddish,[1] Afrikaans and Hungarian are notable for having many separable verbs.
'The verb letesz (le- prefix) is separated in the negative sentence.
Affixes in Hungarian are also separated from the verb in imperative and prohibitive moods.
However, in English the particle is always a separate word (e.g. give up), without the possibility of grammatically conditioned alternations between the two.
An adverbial particle can be separated from the verb by intervening words (e.g. up in the phrasal verb screw up appears after the direct object, things, in the sentence He is always screwing things up).
Hence theories of syntax that assume that form–meaning correspondences should be understood in terms of syntactic constituents are faced with a difficulty, because it is not apparent what sort of syntactic unit the verb and its particle build.
In German, among other languages, some verbs can exist as separable and inseparable forms with different meanings.