Summary Details
| Query: |
Sum: Particle Movement
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| Author: | StThGries StThGries | |
| Submitter Email: | click here to access email | |
| Linguistic LingField(s): |
Syntax
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| Summary: |
Dear Linguist Listers, about a month ago I posted a query regarding literature on 'particle movement' in English or, to be more precise, literature on factors contributing to the position of the particle in transitive phrasal-verb constructions such as (1) a. John brought back the book. b. John brought the book back. In the beginning, I'd like to thank very much all of those who responded and shared their knowledge with me. Apart from some very valuable hints I even received offers to send me unpublished papers or to share the up to now unpublished results of recent research concerning the topic in question. Additionally, some answers were suggestions concerning methodological matters or exceptions from the rules generally cited. Now that I have managed to mail my answers to all of them individually (my sincere apologies to those who had had to wait unexpectedly long for their answers) I want to post the summary of all those who contributed to my research followed by their suggestions or references (in alphabetical order): - ------------------ Aarts, Bas (b.aarts@ucl.ak.uk): Dear Stefan Gries, Regarding your query on LINGUIST, you may want to have a look at a paper of mine in the Journal of Linguistics, 25.2, 1989, 277-290: `Verb-preposition constructions and small clauses in English' (and references cited there). This article also appears in modified form in my book _Small Clauses in English: the nonverbal types_. New York and Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. 1992. Hope this is helpful. Bas Aarts Cameron, Richard (rcameron@uic.edu) For an article which investigates "the factors contributing to the position of the particle", see: Kroch, Anthony and Cathy Small. 1978. Grammatical ideology and its Effect on speech. In David Sankoff (ed.) Linguistic variation: Models and methods. New York: Academic Press. Pp. 45-55. Good luck. Richard Cameron Durham.Linguistics@durham.ac.uk (Durham Linguistics) You might like to look at: Johnson, K. 1991. Object positions. _Natural Language and Linguistic Theory_ 9:577-636. Fischer, Susan (currently: fischer@sal.tohoku.ac.jp) I did my 1971-2 MIT dissertation on the acquisition of verb-particle constructions as well as double-object constructions in English. I do not have a copy of my dissertation (The Acquisition of Verb-Particle and Dative Constructions) with me here on sabbatical, but the main point of the structure chapter was that unstressed pronoun direct objects are cliticized to the verb -- so you must say "I gave it up" rather than "I gave up it". However, if the pronoun has inherent or contrastive stress, the particle can intervene between the verb and the object: "ok I gave up that a long time ago", "I gave up HIM, He didn't give up ME." Good luck with your work. Susan Fischer Foster, Joseph F. (Joseph.Foster@UC.Edu) Mr. Gries, Re your query on LINGUIST re bring NP back and structures of that ilk, I believe Chomsky actually used this as one of his examples motivating transformations in SYNTACTIC STRUCTURES. Nelson Francis also did in his Structure of American English which was basically an Immediate Constituent analysis a la Rulon Wells. My chief reason for returning your signal however is to let you know if you don't already (as your signal suggests you may not) that there is certainly a dialect of English in which the particle MUST ALWAYS follow a pronoun direct object. Thus your (2) b ***John picked up him. is NEVER grammatical in my English (I speak natively Ozark English but am fluent in Standard Southern American and pretty fair in Midwestern.) Even if the HIM be contrastively stressed, it can never follow the particle. On the other hand, your 1 a and b are both OK. Joe Foster Fraser, Bruce (bfraser@bu.edu) If you get any answers to your query, I would appreciate learning of the article. Good luck. Bruce Fraser Hagstrom (hagstrom@scf.usc.edu) Try Hawkins' "Performance Theory of Order and Constituency" Cambridge University Press 1994 for a processing approach to word order. Cynthia Hawkins, John (hawkins@almaak.usc.edu) Hi Stefan: I saw your question on the linguist list re particle positioning. I have quite a bit of discussion on the ordering of verb, particle and NP in my 1994 book A Performance Theory of Order and Constituency, CUP, pp.180-182, and also some textual data. In the meantime I have collected a whole bunch more data, and have examined the constituent structure of V-NP-Part sequences in greater detail, and have found ordering evidence for two quite distinct structures here: one I analyze as a predication structure in which the Part is semantically a predication (e.g. lift the child up = the child is up); one in which it is not and which I analyze as a discontinuous verb-particle structure (look the number up does not equal the number is up). The proposed constituency difference predicts different orderings in conjunction with the basic ordering principle of my book (Early Immediate Constituents). I haven't got this stuff written up yet, but I'll be happy to share it with you when I have. Best wishes, John Hawkins Kemmer, Suzanne E. (kemmer@ruf.rice.edu) I'm happy to hear you're going to work on English particles. I don't have any references to give you, only a suggestion: The generative work on particles was not very empirical, and never actually looked at the distribution of the verb adjacent vs. the postnominal particle. The distribution is highly lexically governed. (For example, I have MANY times heard 'look over it' instead of 'look it over', although all the generative literature assumes only 'look it over', because of the pronoun. The fact is, 'look over' is coalescing into a single unit that overrides the pronoun-first preference.) So, my suggestion is, get yourself a concordance program and actually look at large samples of English. It's true, it will be written data (unless you have a spoken corpus), and as such more conservative and somewhat less open to the innovations people actually make; but some real generalizations will emerge. You can search on the various particles (throwing out the prepositional uses) and get an idea of which verbs like which particles. (If you need suggestions on inexpensive concordance programs, let me know) Good luck, Suzanne Mills, Carl (Carl.Mills@UC.Edu) At the 21st Forum of the Linguistic Association of Canada and the United States (LACUS), I presented a paper entitled "'Obligatory Particle Movement' in English," which is available on pp. 195-204 of the papers from the 21st LACUS Forum, ed. by Mava Jo Powell. I wrote the paper because I had come across several examples in normal English conversation that violated your starred example: (2) a. John picked him up. b. *John picked up him. Because these were examples that I overheard, some on National Public Radio, I knew that your stipulation "(2b) is starred unless 'him' is contrastively stressed" did not hold: the pronoun around which the particle was supposed to have been "moved" was not contrastively stressed. Within a matter of days, I overheard three sentences: He wanted to help out them. He went in the house and put down something. Can you ring up this? I added 21 more sentences, some that I made up and some that had been starred in various linguistics publications, and conducted an acceptability judgment survey using a written questionnaire. Statistically, the results indicated that speakers accept the sort of rule that underlies your starring of (2b) above, but they don't always obey the rule. There is more, but you can read the paper for that. Good luck. Carl Mills Nathan, Geoff (geoffn@siu.edu) Dear Stefan, A number of years ago we had a student work on this problem, and she wrote a thesis using an early version of Cognitive Grammar. She finished her thesis, and unfortunately dropped out of linguistics--I don't even know where she is now. But I could send you a copy of her thesis if that would be of use to you. Best, Geoff Nathan Nolan, Brian (bnolan@iol.ie) You may find what you need in the works of Talmy, listed below. Talmy explores the windowing of attention and the linguistic correlates which pertain to this phenonema. He explains how we can bring to attention, or focus, certain features in a dialogue and how these can manifest themselves linguistically via foregrounding and backgrounding, gapping etc., etc. Talmy's (1996a), or his (1985) work is probably a good place to start Talmy, Leonard. (1996a). Windowing of attention in language in Grammatical Constructions, their form and meaning by Shibatani & Thompson (Publisher ?) Talmy, Leonard. (1996b). Fictive motion in Language and "Ception": The Emanation Type, in P. Bloom et al (Eds.), Language and Space. MIT Press. Cambridge MA. Talmy, Leonard. (1985). Lexicalisation patterns: Semantic Structure in Lexical Forms in T. Shopen (Ed), Language Typology & Syntactic Description iii: Grammatical Categories and the Lexicon. Cambridge University Press. Cambridge MA. Talmy, Leonard. (1978). Figure and Ground in Complex Sentences, in J. H. Greenberg (Ed). Universals of Human Language iv: Syntax. Stanford University Press. Stanford, California. Talmy, Leonard. (1972). Semantic Causative Types in Syntax and Semantics No. 6. Academic Press. New York. Talmy, Leonard. (1996). Semantics and Syntax of Motion in Syntax and Semantics No. 4. Academic Press. New York. Also, the following book is also very, very useful as an intro to the area of cognitive linguistics and may also be of interest to you: Ungerer, F. and Schmid, H., J. (1996). An Introduction to Cognitive Linguistics. Learning About Language Series. Longman. Have fun, Brian Nolan Rohrbacher, Bernhard (bernhard@zora.ling.nwu.edu) Ich nehme an, Du bist mit den diversen Artikeln von Kyle Johnson zu diesem Thema vertraut. Siehe auch mein Papier "*English Verbs Move Never" in volume 1 der University of Pennsylvania Working Papers in Linguistics. Alles Gute, Bernhard Rohrbacher Svenonius, Peter (sven@isl.uit.no) I can give you a quick rundown of the major syntactic accounts of particle shift. I realize this may not really be what you're looking for, but all of the following references do treat the alternation in word order, although not from a functional or cognitive perspective. Richard Kayne has a 1985 article in which he adopts a "small clause" configuration for the particle construction (i.e. "the book back" would be a small clause, in your example) and relates particle shift to Heavy NP Shift; the particle moves to the right when it is phonologically "heavy". I adopted the small clause configuration from Kayne but criticized the Heavy NP Shift approach to the word order variation in a 1992 article, and proposed a technical syntactic solution for particle shift (based on the particle "incorporating" into the verb). Den Dikken, in his 1992 dissertation (later published as den Dikken 1995) agreed with my rejection of Kayne's analysis but tendered some accurate criticism of my approach, and offered a different syntatic analysis, which also adopts the small clause structure but which in which shift is characterized as NP movement across the particle for Case reasons. In my 1994 dissertation, I accept den Dikken's criticism of my 1992 analysis but show some evidence that the base structure he assumes is incorrect. I propose another syntactic account based on two alternative movements; either the particle moves or the NP moves. In later work I have developed this approach and extended it to the Scandinavian languages. I have one article published in 1996 in Working Papers in Scandinavian Syntax and a longer one that hasn't been published anywhere (yet!). I also have a review of den Dikken's book published in the journal Language. Two additional recent references are Johnson's 1991 (?) article in Natural Language and Linguistic Theory, in which the verb plus particle start out as a constituent, and the verb moves from the particle (as in most analyses of German and Dutch), and Collins & Thrainsson's 1996 Linguistic Inquiry article, in which the particle first moves up to attach to the verb, as in my 1992 article, and then the verb moves away, as in Johnson. All of the above works deal to some extent with the basic pattern of shift, which is that pronouns precede the particle and modified particles (and particles with complements) follow the noun phrase -- with greater or lesser degrees of success. For example, pronouns are often considered to have special properties with respect to Case, and this has been exploited in several of the above works. In my dissertation, I speculate somewhat inconclusively that the special positioning of pronouns may be due to their prosodic lightness, and I expand on that possibility in the WPSS article, where I show that destressed NPs are best before the particle, while stressed NPs are better after the particle, e.g. (1) How with the girls get here? a. I'll pick the girls UP b. * I'll pick up the GIRLS c. I'll pick UP the girls (2) Who will you pick up? a. I'll pick up the GIRLS b. * I'll pick the girls UP c. I'll pick the GIRLS up In each case, the (a) example is best, because the natural right-edge pitch increase coincides with an element that is not old information. The (b) examples are bad because salient old information should not be stressed. The (c) examples are acceptable, because sentence stress doesn't fall on the old information, but are less good than the (a) examples, because the stress has been shifted away from the right edge of the sentence. In the article I provide a technical formal account of this fact. The same kind of account might extend to the pronouns and modified particles, but some more work is needed, since examples with particle before pronoun or modified particle after NP are worse than the (c) examples above, even with stress shift to the left. However, the fact that stress on a pronoun (or coordination of pronouns, which also makes them phonologically heavy) allow it to follow the particle suggests a prosodic account. I realize this has been rather breezy, but it's because I don't know how much of it really is of interest to you. If you me to expand on something, just ask. If you want more complete references, or if you would like me to send any of my own papers, I'd be happy to oblige. Best, Peter Svenonius - ------------------ Again, thanks very much to all of you Stefan Th. Gries |
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| LL Issue: | 8.879 | |
| Date Posted: | 15-Jun-1997 | |
| Original Query: | Read original query | |
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