This article elucidates the synchronic and diachronic status of English light verbs. In doing so, it contributes to the debate on the status of light verbs cross-linguistically. Synchronically, light verbs appear to straddle the boundary between lexical and functional categories. This has led to the view that light verbs are a diachronic stage on a grammaticalisation cline from full verb to auxiliary. Another view holds that light verbs are historically a dead-end. In this article I will present synchronic and diachronic data that show that the history of English light verbs does not display signs of grammaticalisation. I will argue that English light verbs are synchronic variants of full verbs.

Verb particles (e.g. up, out, off, down, away) are a well‐known and well studied feature of English and of Germanic languages in general. Nevertheless, the functional and categorial status of English verb particles remains debated, and, especially in the diachronic literature on OV/VO word‐order change, this question is typically avoided entirely. This lack of precision about the nature of verb particles is surprising, given the central role attributed to verb particles as diagnostic elements for basic word order. We motivate an analysis of English verb particles as (optionally) projecting intransitive prepositions which function as secondary predicates. In relation to the OV/VO issue, we claim that, although there is a statistically strong cross‐Germanic correlation between the position of verb particles and verb complements, the position of verb particles is not a diagnostic for OV/VO order. To support this claim, we will show that there is no one‐to‐one correspondence a) between Prt–V surface word order and an underlying OV grammar, or b) between V–Prt surface word order and an underlying VO grammar. Moreover, it will be shown that OV order with DP‐objects in early Middle English is highly discourse‐sensitive, suggesting that OV order with DP‐objects is not determined by phrase structure, but by discourse‐sensitive scrambling from a VO base.

This article examines possible motivations for the choice of particle verb word order in Middle English (1100-1500) and Early Modern English (1500-1700). The word order alternation of Present-Day English particle verbs, which presents language users with a choice between verb-object-particle and verb-particle-object order, first emerged in Early Middle English (twelfth century). For Present-Day English, several studies (e.g. Gries 1999Gries , 2003Dehé 2002) have shown that the choice is influenced by a number of linguistic factors, such as the heaviness of the object (morphosyntactic factor) and the givenness of the object (discourse factor). This article reveals the influence of a number of morphosyntactic factors and also shows that the choice is increasingly influenced by the givenness of the object. The differences between Present-Day English on the one hand and Middle and Early Modern English on the other hand are discussed in the light of syntactic changes going on in these periods. It is argued that the developments in particle verb syntax are characterised by an increasing division of labour between the two word orders, which may also explain why both orders survive into Present-Day English. Recent work includes Elenbaas (2007) and Los et al. (2012); other recent studies, such as Ishizaki (2012) andThim (2012), tend to focus on issues of style, semantics, usage and grammaticalisation, rather than on syntax.

In Present-Day English, the particle out is obligatorily adjacent to the following of PP, as in He pulled the plugs out of his ears / *He pulled out the plugs of his ears, even though particles can normally precede or follow the object of the particle verb, as in Hepulled out the plugs / Hepulled the plugs out. Interestingly, in Old English and Middle English, the particle out could occur either adjacent or nonadjacent to the of PP. Based on corpus data covering the period from Old English to Late Modern English, I show that the change in the syntax of directional out of involves grammaticalization: The bleaching of the directional meaning of the preposition of led to a structural reanalysis by which the of PP became included in the particle's phrasal projection and could no longer be separated from the particle out. This in turn led to phono-logical reduction of the preposition of. The loss of the nonadjacent option is argued to be connected to the status of particles as optionally projecting elements.*

Particle verbs (combinations of two words but lexical units) are a notorious problem in linguistics. Is a particle verb like look up one word or two? It has its own entry in dictionaries, as if it is one word, but look and up can be split up in a sentence: we can say He looked the information up and He looked up the information. But why can't we say He looked up it? In English look and up can only be separated by a direct object, but in Dutch the two parts can be separated over a much longer distance. How did such hybrid verbs arise and how do they function? How can we make sense of them in modern theories of language structure? This book sets out to answer these and other questions, explaining how these verbs fit into the grammatical systems of English and Dutch.