As is well known, the grammatical word order of English allows only few changes in the position of sentence elements. Leaving aside different placement of the same element due to syntactic change or to emotive and/or emphatic factors reflected in the fronting of a normally postverbal element, unmarked alternative word order is found with adverbials, whose position is largely mobile, and some verbs complemented by more than one element. Here the grammatical word order offers more than one choice so that other factors may come into play, notably the functional sentence perspective (FSP); it can be supposed that the position of these systemically mobile elements is connected with their function in FSP.
Of the permissible unmarked changes in the linear arrangement of the clause elements, the present paper is concerned with the mutual position of the two components following a transitive phrasal verb, the object and the particle. Obviously, only substantival objects are taken into account, since pronominal objects allow only one position, that before the particle