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
(2e) *Drunks would put [ P Poff the customers] (2f) *Drunks would put the customers [ P Poff the customers] 1.3 What category is the particle? Let us now review the main points of two markedly different approaches to phrasal verbs. According to the traditional approach, the particle is an adverbial to the verb and it enters into a complex lexical verb (hence the name) with the verb in the D-structure (Akmajian et al 1984:200-204). In other words, the particle is between the verb and the object underlyingly. At S-structure, an optional movement to the right of the object is possible, which is called Particle Movement (Akmajian et al 1984:202). However, Particle Movement (normally an option) becomes compulsory if the object is a personal pronoun. On the other hand, it cannot apply if the object NP is very 'long' (phonologically 'heavy'). It seems to follow from this that optionality is largely dependent upon the 'size' of the object NP (the personal pronoun normally being very 'light'). (6c) You may look up [ N P the word that you've been trying to guess.] (6d) ?*You may look [ N P the word that you've been trying to guess] up. As we have seen before, Radford (1988:90-101) claims that a phrasal verb is separated in the D-structure and the particle is a PP in this case (see 1.3). Thus, the optional movement that takes place in this framework is the exact opposite of Particle Movement, a reason why I call it Inverse Particle Movement. Naturally, optionality changes accordingly with personal pronouns and 'heavy' NPs as objects since this model is to desribe the same linguistic data. Otherwise, at S-structure IPM may (optionally) move the particle leftwards, between the verb and the object NP. However 'innocent' this movement may seem, it raises some very crucial theoretical questions about transformations since the particle, after the application of IPM, seems to be 'only' a P, and not a PP, as before the movement. The explanation for this is evident: when the particle is next to the verb, it cannot be pre-or postmodified so there is no reason to assume that it is a PP (unless we can come up with some sensible constraints), otherwise it must be a P (lexical category). The question is, then, the following: Do we allow movement to change 95
