It is generally assumed within the tradition of Construction Grammar that the oblique grammatical function for the English caused-motion construction directly corresponds to a prepositional phrase (PP), such as in the jar in put the spoons in the jar. Opposed to the assumption, this paper argues that the oblique function actually narrowly corresponds to the noun phrase (NP) complement of the head preposition. On the other hand, the transitive preposition is an integral part of the predicate that it forms with a lexical verb, what we shall term a complex predicate. It is thus in phrasal syntax that the preposition, together with the oblique NP, forms or corresponds to the PP. This argument is supported by the class of phrasal verb constructions with so-called unpredicated particles, such as off in wipe off the table and wipe the table off (≠*The table is off). The paper also advances an alternative analysis of the construction with theoretical advantages.

Predicate-as Parentheticals exhibit word order variability that interacts with contrastive focus placement on the subject or an adjunct phrase. While Culicover and Winkler (2008) discuss that as-clauses share certain properties with other focus inversion construc- tions, a concrete syntactic analysis of Predicate-as clauses has not been provided in the previous studies in order to explain such word order variations as the auxiliary verb cluster phenomenon. This paper proposes that the complicated word order patterns in Predicate-as clauses be accounted for in terms of a constructional constraint for a focus inversion clause, without changing the basic syntactic and semantic analyses of As-Parentheticals. In our analysis, the focus-inversion-clause construction imposes a constraint on the word order domain, so that word order variability needs not to be directly reflected on the constituent structure of the clause.