Particle movement: A cognitive and functional approach

Theaimof this article is toprovideanaccount ofone instance ofgrammatical or configurational variation, namely ‘‘particle movement’’. While in traditional grammarians’ works a variety of factors were claimed to influence the choice of one word order over another, in the transformational generative paradigm, factors other than syntactic ones were, on the whole, neglected. In more recent functionalist accounts, however, Cumming (1982) and Chen (1986) have shown that an analysis of ‘‘particle movement’’ benefits from also considering pragmatic factors. In this article, drawing on the work by Deane (1992: 199‐205), I shall formulate a hypothesis under which all of the factors so far investigated can be subsumed. Second, I will show that the results of a corpus analysis and a survey conducted with native speakers of British English support this main hypothesis. Lastly, I will propose an explanation of the distributional data in terms of processing requirements.