Chapter 4 of Discourse Syntax (Variation in the Middle) introduces students to syntactic patterns that lead to sentences with non-canonical subjects or variation in the way the verb’s arguments are realized, including the object position. After discussing principles of canonical argument realization, including facts from language acquisition and insights from psycholinguistics, the chapter discusses the passive construction, including in preposition stranding contexts, and the verb-particle construction (also known as “phrasal verbs”), in the context of establishing topics, arranging given and new information, and shifting complex material to the end of the sentence (Principle of End-Weight). Woven into these explanations are data from current research in the text-linguistic and variationist approach and attestations from freely available corpora.

This chapter considers the borderline between morphology and syntax and the ways in which morphology and syntax interact with each other. We begin with a look at the ways in which morphology can affect the valency or argument structure of sentences, considering passives and anti-passives, which decrease valency, and causatives and applicatives, which increase valency. We then go on to look at processes of noun incorporation and cliticization and at phrasal verbs, verbs with separable prefixes, and so-called phrasal compounds. The chapter concludes with alook at morphological versus syntactic (periphrastic) expression in English comparatives and superlatives.