Variable Particle Positioning in Transitive Phrasal Verbs

The present work investigates the English transitive phrasal verb construction (TPV) and the reasons for its variable particle placement. Particles can be placed continuously or discontinuously in relation to the construction verb, e.g. "turn off the computer" and "turn the computer off", respectively. Several studies point out that noun phrase (NP) length (Hawkings 1994, Gorlach 2004, Lohse et al. 2004, Quirk et al. 1985) and idiomaticity (Gries 2001, Gorlach 2004) motivate particle placement. A study of particles "away", "off" and "out" in TPVs is developed in favour of an account that considers specific constructions as chunks due to repetition. The hypothesis supported in this work associates loss of analysability and gain of entrenchment between verb and particle with high token frequency. Thus, a TPV becomes a sequence with verb + particle packaged together and accessed as a unit in consequence of its frequent use (Bybee 2010). Written discourse data collected from BNC (British National Corpus) show a significant preference for the continuous order in spite of constructions’ variable levels of compositionality and idiomaticity. In relation to particles "away", "off" and "out", there is a difference in frequency and range of verbs used with each particle: while "away" is part of only 8% of the data and "off", 26%, the particle "out" is present in 66% of all TPVs, which makes "out" both the most recurrent particle in the sample and the one with highest type frequency: 96 different verbs were part of "out" constructions. Results also demonstrate that some verbs are used in both continuous and discontinuous order, whereas others are restricted to one construction only: "take" joins all three particles and in both orders, while "carry" is always immediate to "out". NPs that follow "carry out" all bear semantic resemblance, indicating they form sequential and indivisible units which seem to be motivated by the NP characteristics.