Particle placement and the case for “allostructions”

As a reaction against derivational frameworks, Construction Grammar accords no place to regular alternations between two surface patterns. This paper argues for a more tolerant position towards alternations. With respect to the well-known placement variability of verbal particles (pick up the book / pick the book up), the author grants that there is little reason for analysing one ordering as underlying the other but goes on to show that it is equally problematic to claim that the two orderings code two different meanings (or serve two different functions) and therefore cannot be linked in the grammar as variants of a single category. The alternative offered here is to consider the two orderings as two “allostructions” of a more general transitive verb-particle construction underspecified for word order.