Blurb:

Stefan Gries’s chapter studies the early acquisition of the constituent order alternation of English verb-particle constructions such as He gave back the bottle vs. He gave the bottle back, where the choice between these two constructions has been shown to be determined by a large number of linguistic and psycholinguistic determinants. On the basis of data from the CHILDES set of corpora, the article investigates several hundred constructions from three children, with the aim of determining to what extent previously-studied syntactic and semantic factors, as well as new phonological and frequency variables that have received little attention,may affect early particle placement. Gries also discusses lexically specific preferences for particular verb-particle constructions and examines to what degree data from different children may be conflated.