To one member of the Linglex advisory committee we owe a special debt—Philip Scholfield, who, when the book was heing assembled for publication, went through it with a fine-tooth comb in his capacity as editor for style and presentation. | 932 WORD ORDER AND RELATED SYNTACTIC CHOICES He made it impossible for her to do anything fict My husband has made it clear he doesn t agree to me going news In the second pattern make clear seems to be treated like a complex verb cf. make sure make certain But he made clear it was not a sacking offence. news The placement of objects of phrasal verbs A Discourse choice between mid-position and post-particle placement Direct objects of two-place phrasal verbs may be placed before or after the adverbial particle. In the following examples the adverbial particle is given in brackets and the direct object is marked in bold 1 Why do you like picking up the telephone so much conv 2 How fast can you pick it up conv Where the direct object is a pronoun as in 2 it is normally placed between the verb and the particle this order will be called mid position. The ordering in 1 will be called post-particle position. B Full noun phrase object placement with phrasal verbs across registers in relation to length of object CORPUS FINDINGS 1 For pronominal direct objects mid-position placement is the norm being chosen well over 90 of the time . For direct objects with full noun phrases mid-position placement is by far most frequent in conversation. - Proportionally it is used over 60 of the time with phrasal verbs in that register. In contrast mid-position placement is used less than 10 of the time with phrasal verbs in the written registers where absolute frequencies are also smaller than in conversation. Mid-position placement is much more common with full noun phrase direct objects of two to four words in length rather than longer objects in all registers. Table Distribution of mid-position placement of direct objects excluding pronouns of different lengths for selected phrasal verbs bring out bring up carry out carry up make out make up take out take up- occurrences per million words each represents 10 - represents less than 5 length of the direct object CONV FICT .
