This article offers a comprehensive analysis of the constituent-structure and linear-order properties of English transitive and intransitive V-P constructions involving so-called ‘particles’ (turn on the lights/the lights on, mess up the song/the song up, shut up, sit down, etc.). Drawing on both standard and certain new evidence and arguments, it is proposed that V-P constructions generally come in one or both of two varieties: lexical compounds (mess up in mess up the song) and/or discontinuous verbs, that is, lexemes with more than one piece projected as a word or phrase (mess … up in mess the song up), and that the alternation, for those that have both manifestations, reflects different argument structure possibilities for a lexeme with the same overall conceptual semantics. The internal structure of VPs built on V-P lexemes is examined in some detail. The popular ‘small-clause’ approach, according to which the DP of transitive V-P structures is the subject of a phrase that has the P as its predicate, is shown to be problematic, primarily because there in fact exists a true small-clause construction that can have a P as its predicate and the putative small clause of cases like mess the song up systematically lacks the defining properties of this construction. The word-order restrictions that the small-clause approach is designed, in part, to account for are shown to follow from a set of independently needed linearization constraints, which are motivated by functional principles.

Through a detailed examination of a particular sentence type, we outline a formal model in which grammatical description includes the description of use conditions on form-meaning pairs. The sentence type at issue is an exclamative construction we refer to as Nominal Extraposition (NE). This construction, exemplified by the sentence It's AMAZING the DIFFERENCE, bears a superficial resemblance to Right Dislocation (RD). However, NE must be distinguished from RD on syntactic, semantic and discourse-pragmatic grounds. The postpredicate NP represents a TOPIC in the case of RD, a FOCUS in the case of NE; this NP receives a metonymic scalar interpretation in the case of NE, but not in RD. We employ the framework of Construction Grammar and seek to demonstrate that it is uniquely suited to grammatical description of the type required here: NE represents a gestaltlike interaction of formal, semantic and pragmatic constraints. We argue for a compatible formalism akin to that found in recent versions of Lexical-Functional Grammar in which argument structure and syntactic constituency parallel a level of representation incorporating categories of INFORMATION STRUCTURE. In addition, we seek to validate the notion—central to Construction Grammar—that sentence types are a crucial basis for syntactic description. In particular, we argue that NE is an instance of the exclamative sentence type and that basic formal and semantic properties of NE follow from this categorization. We suggest that the relationship between NE and like exclamatives can be represented in an INHERITANCE NETWORK.

Why is it preferable to say salt and pepper over pepper and salt? Based on an analysis of 692 binomial tokens from online corpora, we show that a number of semantic, metrical, and frequency constraints contribute significantly to ordering preferences, overshadowing the phonological factors that have traditionally been considered important. The ordering of binomials exhibits a considerable amount of variation. For example, although principal and interest is the more frequent order, interest and principal also occurs. We consider three frameworks for analysis of this variation: traditional optimality theory, stochastic optimality theory, and logistic regression. Our best models—using logistic regression—predict 79.2% of the binomial tokens and 76.7% of types, and the remainder are predicted as less frequent—but not ungrammatical—variants.