A Multifactorial Analysis of Syntactic Variation: Particle Movement Revisited

The present paper investigates the word order alternation of English transitive phrasal verbs such as, e.g., to pick up the book versus to pick the book up. It builds on traditional monofactorial analyses, but argues that previously used methods of analysis are grossly inadequate to describe, explain and predict the word order choice by native speakers. A hypothesis integrating virtually all relevant variables ever postulated is proposed and investigated from a multifactorial perspective (using GLM, linear discriminant analysis and CART). As a result, more than 84% of native speakers' choices can be predicted. Further implications (linguistic and methodological) are discussed.