Description: This book presents a novel analysis of the word-order alternation of English transitive phrasal verbs (Particle Movement) from a cognitive-functional and psycholinguistic perspective. Its main objective, however, is a methodological one, namely, to demonstrate the superiority of corpus-based, multifactorial and probabilistic approaches to grammatical phenomena over traditional analyses based on acceptability judgements and minimal pair tests. The advantages resulting from the advocated multifactorial approach to Particle Movement are: Particle Movement can be described at a previously unknown level of detail; all determinants ever proposed to govern the alternation can be integrated into a single hypothesis explaining the alternation; constructions can be compared to each other with respect to their degree of prototypicality and similarity; it is possible to actually predict with a high degree of accuracy which of the two word orders native speakers will subconsciously choose in the natural production of speech and text (thereby passing the most rigorous test conceivable); finally, competing hypotheses can be compared in terms of their predictive power.
Brief description: Stefan Thomas Gries teaches in the Dept of Linguistics at the University of California, Santa Barbara.