The English language makes ample use of verbs combined with a particle ("go away", "give up", "fool around", "laugh one's socks off", etc.). Such combinations are often described individually as seperate entities, witness the large supply of dictionaries of phrasal verbs. However, the individual combinations also exhibit numerous regularities among them that cannot be brought out in a purely lexical approach. This dissertation aims to provide a comprehensive descriptive overview of the productive and semi-productive grammatical patterns that we can extract from the diverse combinations and from the way they are used in different grammatical contexts.

Among other issues, the author investigates whether particles are aptly analyzed as merely 'intransitive prepositions' (i.e. wether, e.g., "walk across" is nothing but a shortened and less specific version of, say, "walk across the desert"), how we should describe the structure of an expanded particle phrase (as in "walk [right on across to the other side]"), how VPs with a particle can differ in transitivity from corresponding VPs without a particle (cp. grammatical "The dog barked me away" and ungrammatical *"The dog barked me"), what patterns with an aspectually (rather than spatially) used particle there are (e.g. "joke around" as opposed to "walk around"; "nerd it up" as opposed to "toss it up").

'Pattern' has a double meaning in this dissertation: it can refer to 'construction' (in a wide, Construction Grammar sense) on the one hand and to 'regularly occurring relation between constructions' on the other. For example, 'V Prt NP' (as in "glam up the place") and 'V NP Prt' (as in "glam the place up") are both patterns in the first sense, and the fact that these two orderings can (often) be used interchangeably is by virtue of there being a pattern in the second sense. By considering alternations, too, as linguistic units, the author gives the oft-discredited transformations of Chomskyan linguistics a new place in the grammar of a language.