Abstract
The placement of the particle before or after an object in the English verb-particle construction is influenced by a variety of factors. We argue that many of them can be subsumed under a single simple principle, motivated by considerations of processing efficiency: to the extent that the domains of syntactic and semantic dependencies can be minimized, processing is facilitated. We use a more precise formulation of this idea to make several predictions about the distribution of particles based on the size of the object NP and the semantic dependencies among the verb, the particle, and the object. Corpus studies confirm the predictions, providing evidence for the principle of domain minimization.
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