Focus Effects on Particle Placement in English and the Left Periphery of Pp *

This paper examines topic and focus effects on word order in English particle verb constructions. Several authors have reported that speakers often prefer the Verb-Particle-Object (VPO) order when the object has new information focus, and the Verb-Object-Particle (VOP) order when the object is discourse-given (Bolinger 1971, Svenonius 1996a, Kayne 1998, Dehé 2002). We illustrate this effect in (1) and (2) from Svenonius (1996a), who notes, nevertheless that there is considerable cross-speaker variation in these judgments, and that for most speakers, both orders are at least partially acceptable in both contexts.