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I was told that the first sentence is usual but the second one would be hardly said.

  1. He got his memory back thanks to the album.
  2. He got back his memory thanks to the album.

And I think both are OK and actually used in the reality.

But someone insists the second is GRAMMATICALLY OK but not really used. He insists that it would be OK if the object(noun) was long, but in this case the noun is too short to go behind.

And I can still see a lot of cases about "get back a simple noun" pattern in the link below. https://youglish.com/pronounce/get%20back%20my/english?

So I think this is just kinda optional and both are used. What do you guys think about this? The short nouns can hardly go behind phrasal verbs?

gotube
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Englishy
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    A century ago, He got back his strength was actually more common in AmE than He got his strength back. And that was still true of BrE right up until the 1960s.But although there has been quite a marked usage shift over time, it's ridiculous to suggest either format is "uncommon". – FumbleFingers Nov 06 '23 at 04:21
  • @FumbleFingers I like it better when you're in "let's take N-gram with a grain of salt" mode. What appears in writing could be the result of rulers coming down hard on knuckles. – TimR on some device Nov 06 '23 at 17:05
  • @TimR: I've always assumed that many a knuckle was rapped in defense of ludicrous strictures like Never end a sentence with a preposition and Never split an infinitive. But in the grand scheme of things, imho such pedantry has had little or no effect on actual usage. Native Anglophones learn English by listening and talking to other Anglophones, not by listening to grammarians! – FumbleFingers Nov 06 '23 at 18:32
  • But published prose often gets edited and "cleaned up". I don't think we can conclude from that N-gram evidence that "got back {object]" was more common than "got [object] back" https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=got+back+my+strength%2Cgot+my+strength+back&year_start=1800&year_end=2019&corpus=en-2019&smoothing=3 – TimR on some device Nov 06 '23 at 21:39

1 Answers1

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They are both grammatically correct. The first one is much more commonly used with short objects, and the second one more with long objects.

The more formal the writing, the less natural the second one feels with short objects. So "...not really used" applies to formal written contexts, but is an exaggeration elsewhere. Having a long object split the phrasal verb is fine in everyday, informal and unprepared speech, like many of the videos you found on YouGlish.

gotube
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    It's probably been covered by previous answers, but with phrasal verbs the position of the object *isn't* flexible if the object is a pronoun. So He got the money back, He got back the money, and He got it back are all fine, but ** *He got back it* is INVALID. – FumbleFingers Nov 06 '23 at 04:29
  • @FumbleFingers That's true, though only about *personal pronouns*, not all of them. I thought about it, but if felt too tangential to the question, like it would be more confusing than helpful. The OP only asked about short objects, not the rules for separable phrasal verbs with personal pronouns in particular. – gotube Nov 06 '23 at 04:38
  • Until I read it from you, I wasn't consciously aware that the modern preference for inserting the object within the phrasal verb is particularly strong with short noun phrases (but it's pretty obvious when you think about it; parsing is far more awkward if the two halves of a phrasal verb are too far apart). But perhaps the "*only* "break" phrasal verbs with *short* objects" principle is actually connected to the "*always* break phrasal verbs with *pronouns*" principle. They certainly seem to be at least "compatible" principles. – FumbleFingers Nov 06 '23 at 04:49
  • In my neck of the woods, it's not at all unusual to hear things like I got the sweater I lost at last week's football game back. "According to linguist Barbara Johnstone, migration patterns and geography affected the dialect's development, which was especially influenced by immigrants from Northern England, Scotland, and Northern Ireland." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philadelphia_English#:~:text=Philadelphia%20English%20or%20Delaware%20Valley,and%20Kent)%2C%20the%20northern%20Eastern – TimR on some device Nov 06 '23 at 17:14
  • @FumbleFingers Yes, I'd be surprised if the pronouns rule didn't share a history with the tendency to place longer objects after the particle. – gotube Nov 06 '23 at 20:26
  • @TimR: Each to their own, I guess. But given it's only the 6th of November, when I read your text I can't help half-expecting something like I got the sweater I lost at last week's football game back in October. I won't go so far as to say "never end a sentence with a preposition", but think in general it's poor style to put a preposition that's part of a known "verb+preposition" pair too far away from the actual verb it's syntactically linked to. It makes far too much unnecessary work for the reader / audience. – FumbleFingers Nov 06 '23 at 20:35
  • @FumbleFingers It's conversation, not writing. That's how people talk where I come from.And it's no work at all for someone who hears it all the time. Germans, for example, have no trouble parsing a sentence with a separable verb prefix delayed until the final word in the clause. Intonation patterns and parsing rythms make it second-nature. – TimR on some device Nov 06 '23 at 21:18
  • @TimR: As a fluent native speaker interacting with other Anglophones, you should all have no problems generating and interpreting slight shifts in prosody (stress, delivery speed, etc.) which massively help parsing in such contexts. Learners usually struggle with such matters from both sides of the verbal interchange, so it's not in their best interests to promote such a stylistic choice. And it *is* a stylistic choice - you could just as easily say I got back* the sweater I lost...* A really considerate speaker might even specifically do that as a courtesy when addressing nns! – FumbleFingers Nov 07 '23 at 11:40
  • @FumbleFingers I'm not promoting anything, just stating a fact, and it may or may not be in a given learner's interest to be aware of it. – TimR on some device Nov 07 '23 at 12:50
  • I'm not disagreeing with your "fact". I'm not really even disagreeing with the fact of you posting the information here. It's also relevant that I myself would probably never notice (and certainly wouldn't be tripped up by) you or anyone else delaying the preposition part of a "phrasal verb" until a *very* long way after the associated *verb. My comments here are primarily by way warning any learners* reading that they should probably avoid using the style themselves (and just maybe, get used to the fact that many native speakers do it fairly indiscriminately). – FumbleFingers Nov 07 '23 at 13:01
  • The man insisted that [get my money back] is much more natural and [get back my money] would "hardly" be heard, and he said "Go and ask some native people how many times they have heard [get back + a short noun phrase], not [get a short NP back]. I never heard the people around me say like that even though I'm working among English speakers." He said if the noun phrase is long, then "get" and "back" can be together, but they hardly can if the noun phrase is simple and short. How about this? Is this just a exaggeration? – Englishy Nov 07 '23 at 15:03