Az Eszterházy Károly Tanárképző Főiskola Tudományos Közleményei. 1996. Vol. 1. Eger Journal of English Studies.(Acta Academiae Paedagogicae Agriensis : Nova series ; Tom. 24)

Péter Antonyi: Phrasal verbs: an attempt at a syntactic account

the syntactic category of the element moved? The answer to this is definitely 'no', since movement (assuming the basic principle of structure preservation??) should only move elements and not do anything else to them. Then how can we resolve this contradiction? One possibility would be to presume that we are only moving the head (P) of the PP to the verb and not the whole phrase. However, that would also present a host of other serious problems (e.g. why the specifier and the complement position of the PP cannot continue to be filled in after head-movement has taken place), so I will reject this alternative. A possible answer is as follows: suppose that the particle is a PP even when it is non-separated. This is the position I am going to assume in this paper. Then the problem arises: Why cannot we have the premodifier and the complement position filled in? I can provide no satisfactory answer to it at this stage but later in this paper I will try to give a possible explanation. Another way around the problem would be to assume that the separated and the 'corresponding' non-separated phrasal verbs are syntactically unrelated, a position which is hard to defend, given the semantic proximity (if not identity) of the structures in question. 2 Larson's VP-shell hypothesis (1988) 2.1 Motivation: Double Object Constructions Double object constructions include sentences involving ditransitive verbs {give, send, show etc.);'heavy NP shift' transformations etc. Among other models, the following structures were proposed to account for double object constructions (in Larson 1988:336-337): NP

2 One can easily point out the inadequacy of these models by presenting counterexamples. For instance, (7a) would suggest a completely symmetrical behaviour of the two NPs, which they do not 96