I'm working hard on an introduction to a text dealing with the verb-particle paradox. On the one hand, particle verbs such as
call up behave like single words. There are lots of very solid arguments for a morphological analysis, so that saying that
call up is a verb of the form [
V V P] makes perfect sense. On the other hand, if they are words, how can we explain that we can split them up and have their parts separated from each other, as in
call your mother up, something which you can't do with words?
A solution may have to be sought in considering
call up a stored lexical unit which remains unspecified for its grammatical status as either a word or an above-word-level structure. In its discontinuous form (
call ... up), the particle manages to trigger the whole form.
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