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

NP- or Wh-extraction (stranded prepositions). Also, the adverbial ('early') can be placed between the verb ('call') and the preposition ('on') (4e). On the other hand, no adverbial can be put between the verb and the adverbial particle (5e), which seems to confirm the initial supposition that considers them as a single verb. With the phrasal verb in the example, Particle Movement to right of the object NP is possible in both (5c) and (5d). Moreover, particle movement is compulsory in the case of personal pronouns functioning as the object NP (see (5b)). Before discussing the main issues linked with Particle Movement we must consolidate that a phrasal verb can either be transitive or intransitive (just like any other lexical verb) and obviously particle movement only applies to transitive combinations because otherwise there is no object for the particle to move around. However, the Particle Movement rule seems to refute our supposition that a phrasal verb can be taken for a single unit since the adverbial particle gets separated from the verb so it is highly unlikely that they can continue to form a single complex (compound) verb in this configuration. There are also some obvious prosodic differences between phrasal and prepositional verbs. Stress patterns, for instance, play an important part in telling prepositional verbs from phrasal verbs. According to Mitchell (cited in Sroka 1972:164-165): '...the particle component of the phrasal verb can, and does bear a full stress, and when final and not in post-nominal position, is pronounced on a kinetic tone...'. On the other hand, 'It is true that the preposition, by and large, does not normally carry the accent'- Bolinger argues (1971:14). The following pair of sentences will show this contrast: (6a) Jim is not the person I was looking at. but (6b) Kim is not the person I was looking up. However, as the main focus of this paper is various syntactic desciptions of the data, I will not investigate phonological differences any further. 1.2 Radford's (1988) further analysis Let us observe the bracketed version of our initial example sentence with the particle moved (Radford 1988:90-101). 93