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Edit: the answer cited with the closure doesn't answer the question I posed; it merely reinforces the usual placement of the pronoun.

Consider the phrase dash it off.

I dashed it off without thinking of my tone.

We say:

I dashed it off.

I dashed an email off.

I dashed off an email.

but we don't say:

*I dashed off it.

that is, not unless we give special emphasis to it:

Boss (shaking a printed copy of an email): I'm getting complaints about an email you sent out on Monday, apparently without considering your tone.

Employee: Yes, I dashed off it but that was in the morning before I'd had a cup of coffee. After a cup of coffee I was a model employee when it came to writing emails.

What is it about the emphatic tone used to signify "that one, that particular email you're waving around" that allows word-order usually avoided as unidiomatic?

TimR
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    "I dashed off it" sounds off. Maybe "I dashed off that thing because..." – Yosef Baskin Jul 11 '23 at 13:20
  • You could have a look at this: https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/80918/is-it-correct-to-change-the-common-structure-in-these-phrasal-verbs – Stuart F Jul 11 '23 at 13:30
  • @YosefBaskin Of course it sounds off but many native speakers of American English (primarily southerners in my experience, and many of them very well-educated) will use that syntax but only in tandem with strong emphasis on it. – TimR Jul 11 '23 at 14:15
  • @StuartF: That doesn't answer the specific question I posed and makes me think you didn't read my question carefully enough. – TimR Jul 11 '23 at 14:18
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    How on earth did this question get linked to ones in which the answers state that pronouns must come directly after the verb with some phrasal verbs, when this question ALREADY STATES IN BLACK AND WHITE THAT THIS IS THE CASE??? Grrrrrr – Araucaria - Him Jul 11 '23 at 14:21
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    I don't think the OP's "example" is remotely credible, so it's not valid to use it to ask *why* heavy stress allows for a bit more flexibility with phrasal verbs. A better example would be I dashed off that* before I'd really woke up, which is primarily "licensed" by emphasis on the pronoun that*. – FumbleFingers Jul 11 '23 at 14:31
  • @FumbleFingers It may sound totally strange to your ears but I know people who say this sort of thing, and they're literate, well-educated people. The emphasis (for them) allows it to occur not between verb and particle, and when I hear it used with an emphasis that signifies "the specific one you've just mentioned" it doesn't sound so "off" at all to me. "That one" or "that email" is the more normal choice, probably the one I'd make, but that's beside the point. – TimR Jul 11 '23 at 14:40
  • What if the employee's retort had been "... I dashed off it and several others that morning, truth be told". – TimR Jul 11 '23 at 14:44
  • Well, like I said, there's no doubt in my mind that most native speakers would normally say I dashed that off before I'd really woke up, but the heavy stress does tend to make the less common version "more natural". But if you know even one "literate, well-educated" person (or even just any true native Anglophone) who would accept your example with *it*, all I can say is you move in strange circles! – FumbleFingers Jul 11 '23 at 14:47
  • Well, your own example "I dashed off that before I was fully awake" is quite similar. So maybe our circles overlap :-) The emphasis on it makes it function very much like that (one). – TimR Jul 11 '23 at 14:49
  • I stand by my first comment. I didn't actually vote on the question anyway, but if it gets reopened in its present state I will vote to close on the grounds that the usage you're citing is invalid in the first place. But *if* you switch to my example (asking about essentially the same phenomenon), I'll actually *upvote* it. Here's the proof that I dashed that off in a few minutes is far more common than I dashed off that in a few minutes. – FumbleFingers Jul 11 '23 at 15:01
  • (But the one and only instance of the less common version doesn't give any indication of stress. :) – FumbleFingers Jul 11 '23 at 15:02
  • But how can you be relying on a text corpus when the phenomenon I'm asking about is in spoken speech? You'd have to be looking at a corpus where vernacular speech patterns are represented. – TimR Jul 11 '23 at 16:01

1 Answers1

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Emphasis may give a pronoun enough weight to act as one of the heavier noun phrases that support shifting the NP to after the particle.

In a 2017 Language Log post ("English Verb-Particle Constructions"), Spencer Caplan discusses this very phenomenon. With English verb particles, the order is frequently optional, and Caplan gives two examples:

1a) "John picked up the book"

1b) "John picked the book up"

He then notes an exception (pronouns cannot be thus inverted) and an exception to that exception (unless the pronoun is emphasized via what he calls a focus reading):

1c) "John put it back"

1d) *"John put back it" [by default, usually unacceptable]

[we can infer a focus reading 1e) "John put back it"]

Caplan goes on to discuss what affects a speaker's choice of one order or the other in terms of "acceptability judgments." One factor is "the heaviness of the DP-object,"1 that is, when the main object is particularly complex or emphasized, it tends to follow the particle (1a); another is "whether or not the object had been recently referred to in context," that is, if the object is familiar, it tends to precede the particle (1b).

Pronouns as a matter of function usually refer to something that came before and are relatively light, so they tend to the pattern of 1b and 1c. In fact, grammarians commonly insist that only 1c is correct for pronouns (see, as an example, Virginia Heidinger in Analyzing Syntax and Semantics, 1984). However, these acceptability judgments can shift based on context. If a speaker really wanted to emphasize the pronoun to the point of making it heavier, then a speaker's acceptability judgment would support the shift to 1d or 1e in order to show that emphasis:

John put back it.

Yes, I dashed off it [...]

This kind of emphasis is rare, and I cannot recollect encountering such emphasis for it. That's one reason why ELL instruction tends not to mention the exceptions, as this ELL StackExchange answer demonstrates.

For this answer, I did try to find an extant example using dash off and it, but the Corpus of Contemporary American English didn't have anything (the closest it had was "At least he sat down to dash off something"), and Google Books hasn't turned up useful results.

1If you want to see more examples of "heavy" noun phrases allowing a shift to after the particle, Wikipedia ("Heavy NP Shift") gives a decent account.

TaliesinMerlin
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