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Could anyone tell me the difference between"break down the wall" and "break the wall down"?

What would be the correct usage?

Eddie Kal
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Vlad
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  • There's no difference in meaning, and no particular concensus among native speakers as regards whether it's more natural to position the object (the wall) AFTER or WITHIN the phrasal verb (to break down). For learners, by far the most important aspect of such usages is the matter of how the syntax works if the object is a PRONOUN (it's always Break it* down,* never Break down it**). – FumbleFingers Aug 29 '20 at 19:06

1 Answers1

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Break down the wall is far more idiomatic than break the wall down.

Despite no real difference in meaning, here is the relevant Ngram:

enter image description here

This pattern seems to apply to many other nouns as well (e.g. house, data, problem, door).

Use break down the wall.

Micah Windsor
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  • I don't know why that particular pair shows such a strong bias towards having the "object" *after* the phrasal verb, but it certainly doesn't apply to break the problem down / break down the problem. – FumbleFingers Aug 29 '20 at 17:51
  • @FumbleFingersReinstateMonica I find it strange that the Ngram wouldn't show both if they were so close together. I thought it showed the top results, but apparently not. – Micah Windsor Aug 29 '20 at 17:53
  • @FumbleFingersReinstateMonica I took out the entire section because I wildly misinterpreted the graph. – Micah Windsor Aug 29 '20 at 17:59
  • I thought your other graph made sense. Can you explain what was wrong with it? – Eddie Kal Aug 29 '20 at 18:07
  • @EddieKal It did not show the top results, for example, it showed break the house down but not the more common break down the house. So it lead to wrong conclusions. – Micah Windsor Aug 29 '20 at 18:09
  • Well, all I know is that *far more idiomatic* in the first sentence of this answer didn't particularly strike a chord with me. I've just checked break down the x and break the x down in Google NGrams (with x as "wild card" asterisk), to find that *the door* is by far the most common "object", and the difference between putting that *after* or *within* the phrasal verb is still present, but it's only a 2:1 preference. And with more "figurative" objects like *problem, task, process*, there's no particular preference at all. So I feel I must downvote as "misleading". – FumbleFingers Aug 29 '20 at 18:58