LINGUIST List 14.1095

Sun Apr 13 2003

Disc: Review/Dehe: Particle Verbs in English

Editor for this issue: Karen Milligan <karenlinguistlist.org>

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1. Nicole Dehe, Review of Dehe 2002

Particle Verbs in English: Syntax, Information Structure and
Intonation

 Re LINGUIST List 14.078 
 Fri Apr 11 2003. 
 ISSN: 1068-487

 First of all I would like to thank Tully J. Thibeau for his
 review of my book on the particle verb construction (PV) in
 English. However, I do have some comments on his review which
 I would like to outline here.

 In his discussion of Chapter 2, Thibeau claims that I reject
 the small clause (SC) analysis of the PV "primarily because
 PVs do not simulate SCs (We found him foolish/ We found that
 he was foolish v. I put the clown down/*I put that the clown
 was down)" and he adds that "Rejecting SC analyses on grounds
 that PV patterns unlike SC seems inadequate: Some
 constructions construed as SCs avoid the pattern noted by
 Dehe (I made him an associate /*I made that he is an
 associate)."

 It is true that I reject the SC analysis. It is however not
 true that I reject it for the reasons given by Thibeau. In
 fact, I rejected the analysis on exactly these grounds in
 earlier work of mine (Deh� 1997, 2000) but realised soon after
 that an argumentation along these lines is, as correctly
 mentioned by Thibeau, insufficient. I am e.g. quite aware of
 the fact that some true SC's cannot be extended to a full
 clause. In Deh� (2002) I therefore give a number of additional
 and more important syntactic arguments against the SC analysis
 which obviously remain unnoticed by Thibeau (cf. Deh� 2002:
 section II.2). One of these arguments is the fact that the SC
 analysis, which builds on the constituency of the sequences
 [DP Part] (in the order ...turn the oxygen off) and [Part DP]
 (in the order ...turn off the oxygen) cannot account for
 coordination facts (compare: Turn the oxygen off with your
 knee, and the acetylene on with your elbow, but *Turn off the
 oxygen with your knee, and on the acetylene with your
 elbow.). Another objection against the SC analysis that I
 discuss in some detail is concerned with binding theory. True
 SC's and PV's clearly behave differently in this
 respect. Compare: *Sue considered SC [Bill angry at herself]
 vs. Sue considered SC [Bill angry at her]; BUT (PV): The
 fire-fighters pulled the equipment up to themselves vs. *The
 fire-fighters pulled the equipment up to them. In the case of
 PV's then, the matrix clause is the governing category,
 whereas in the case of SC's, it is not. The small clause, but
 not the string [DP Part] in the particle verb construction,
 functions as a complete functional complex in this sense.

 The SC analyses therefore do not "conform with the data
 equally as well as" extended VP analyses (EVPA) (as suggested
 by Thibeau and judged the "principal defect in this chapter"),
 since the EVPA's can account for the problems concerning both
 coordination and binding via the fact that underlyingly, the
 object and particle in PV's do not form a syntactic
 constituent, regardless of which order an author considers
 basic.

 Discussing Chapter 3 Thibeau mentions that a problem of the
 analysis "emerges in the consideration of pronouns, assumed to
 be coreferential, causing discontinous order, but the
 indefinite pronoun 'one' appears in both orders". I mentioned,
 at various point in the discussion, that pronouns other than
 'it' are allowed in the position following the object if
 factors such as givenness and coreferentiality are overridden
 and I also dedicated two sections in chapter 5 (chapters
 5.2.3.5 and 5.2.3.6) to the placement/syntax of pronouns which
 take these facts into account. I therefore also reject
 Thibeaus point later on (commenting on chapter 5) that I have
 concentrated on full (definite) DP's only. This is in fact not
 true. Not only in chapter 5, but also in chapter 4 where I
 present empirical data meant to support my assumptions, I
 include pronominal and semi-pronominal objects in the
 discussion.

 What Thibeau cannot know is that I also had some indefinite
 objects as materials in the intonation studies. These items
 (e.g. I made up a story / I made a story up) behaved in the
 same way as the definite objects.

 Commenting on the fourth chapter Thibeau mentions that
 alternating PV order is not scrambling. I understand that this
 is in agreement with my argumentation in Chapter 5.2.1 where I
 argue, based on the literature on these topics, that English
 has neither object shift (as found in Scandinavian languages)
 nor scrambling (as discussed especially for German) and that
 the preposing of the object in English PV constructions must
 be a movement operation of a different kind despite obvious
 similarities.

 Discussing the intonational studies Thibeau mentions that "one
 may desire to know possible results of nondefinite DPs in
 unmatched contexts and wonder why a neutral order exists but
 normal stress or context must not."

 I do not claim in the book that normal stress or context do
 (and certainly not MUST) not exist. In fact, I merely say
 (like other authors before me, cf. e.g. Bolinger 1958,
 Gussenhoven 1983, 1984, Cruttenden 1997) that the concept of
 normal stress is "some sort of a de-contextualised norm"
 (Cruttenden 1997: 87), i.e. occurs if an utterance is regarded
 as 'all-new' or as a possible response to the question 'What
 happened?'. However, these all-new contexts were not
 considered in the intonation studies, the material of which
 was controlled for focus-background structure. This is the
 only reason why the concept of normal stress is rejected as a
 possible explanation for the results of these studies, as
 explicitly outlined in Section 4.3.3.2. This does certainly
 not mean that normal stress does not exist in clearly neutral
 contexts.

 In his discussion of Chapter 5 of the book, Thibeau claims
 that my syntactic analysis of the PV construction relies on
 Keyser & Roeper's (1992) Abstract Clitic Hypothesis (ACH). He
 continues that "if particles obey ACH, and clitics are
 functional categories, then the revised analysis [of Deh�
 2002] is not radically different from Deh� 2000 (particle as
 functional category) and approaches an analysis where a
 particle is a functional SC head, raising to a functional
 category VP-sister...".

 The crucial thing however is that my 2002 analysis does NOT IN
 ANY WAY rely on Keyser & Roeper's ACH and that therefore in my
 opinion particles DO NOT obey ACH, as I have made explicit in
 Chapter 5.2.3.2, where I say that "the affix involved in my
 proposed analysis cannot be of the same type as the clitic
 marker in Keyser and Roeper's suggestion". I rather follow
 Ishikawa (1999, 2000), who also rejects the ACH, and his
 assumptions about the structure of the verbal head. The
 rejection of the ACH is mainly based on the point that, as
 opposed to the suggestion made by Keyser & Roeper, "markers
 as different as morphologically bound prefixes such as [re-]
 and morphologically free elements such as verbal particles are
 generated in the same syntactic position (Cl)" (cf. Chapter
 5.2.3.2).



 REFERENCES

 Bolinger, Dwight. 1958. "A theory of pitch accent in
 English". In Word 14: 109-149.

 Cruttenden, Alan. 1997. Intonation (2nd edition). Cambridge, MA:
 Cambridge University Press.

 Deh�, Nicole. 1997. Praepositionen im Rahmen des
 Minimalistischen Programms: Eine Klassifizierung. Unpublished
 M.A Thesis. University of Goettingen.

 Deh�, Nicole. 2000. "English particle verbs: Particles as
 functional categories." In Verbal Projections, ed. Hero
 Janssen, T�bingen: Niemeyer, 105-121.

 Deh�, Nicole. 2002. Particle Verbs in English: Syntax,
 Information Structure and Intonation (Linguistics
 Today/Linguistik Aktuell 59). Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John
 Benjamins.

 Gussenhoven, Carlos. 1983. "Focus, mode and the nucleus." In
 Journal of Linguistics 19: 377-417.

 Gussenhoven, Carlos. 1984. On the grammar and semantics of
 sentence accents. Dordrecht: Foris.

 Ishikawa, Kazuhisa. 1999. "English verb-particle constructions
 and a V0-internal structure". In English Linguistics 16:
 329-352.

 Ishikawa, Kazuhisa. 2000. "A local relation between particles
 and verbal prefixes in English". In English Linguistics 17:
 249-275.

 Keyser, Samuel J. & Thomas Roeper. 1992. "Re: The abstract
 clitic hypothesis". In Linguistic Inquiry 23: 89-125.