Focus and Particle Constructions

This paper concerns the issue related to the focus phenomena with a particular reference to the two alternating orders (continuous vs. discontinuous orders) in particle constructions in English. To explain the alternation of word order in particle constructions, I will argue that the choice of word order is closely related to the focus property of the object DPs. Following Drubig (2003), I will assume that focus-feature is taken to be a syntactic feature assigned freely to a lexical head in the process of the mapping into Lexical Array (LA) from the lexicon (LEX). I argue that the focus-marked object DP cannot move out of its focus domain and thus the continuous order is derived. In the case of non-focus-marked object DP, however, the object DP moves out of VP in order to receive an appropriate interpretation. As a result, the discontinuous order is derived.