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A. Alphonso XIII, whose house several generations of students have now LIVED IN, was described as 'a philanthropist'.

B. Alphonso XIII, IN whose house several generations of students have now LIVED, was described as 'a philanthropist'.

Suppose that "live in" is a phrasal verb (in A). If so, what grammatical rule governs the movement of the particle "IN" towards the beginning of the sentence (in B)? The confusing fact is that, as far as I know, in phrasal verbs the particle can be moved only forward, not backward.

Also, can this movement transform the particles into prepositions? Or are particles already prepositions, in any case?

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In this particular case, live in is not the sort of construction which most grammarians would call a phrasal verb. The preposition here cannot move forward: you cannot say ✲The students lived the house in. So The students lived in the house does not have a different sort of sense than The students lived by the river or The students lived on the beach. In the house is simply an ordinary prepositional phrase, an adjunct modifying lived.

In these circumstances, all we're dealing with is the ordinary rule of pied piping:

RULE
When the object of a preposition is replaced or modified by a WH- relative pronoun that is ‘fronted’ (moved to the head of its clause), the preposition may be moved with the WH- word.

Note that 1) this is true only of WH- relatives, not that or the ‘zero’ relative, and 2) it may be moved, not must.

Generally, formal contexts require that the preposition be ‘pied-piped’—moved to the front—while colloquial contexts tend more to ‘strand’ the preposition—to leave it in place after the verb. This is not a rigid distinction, however; corpus studies have shown that even in speech pied piping tends to be employed more than is generally asserted. Here is a long but very interesting study.

Slightly different rules apply with true phrasal verbs, as you may read here.

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I believe here the answer is that "live in" is not a phrasal verb but a plain verb with a preposition. You may live in a house, at an address or even under a bridge, and the preposition is free to move.

Now if you use "Move in" which means "settle":

Alphonso XIII, whose house several generation of students have now moved in, was described as 'a philanthropist'.

Alphonso XIII, in whose house several generation of students have now moved, was described as 'a philanthropist'.

These two have entirely different meaning. The first is that the students brought their property and inhabited the house. The other... the students' limbs were twitching? They appeared as movement on motion scanner? They disobeyed a strict order to remain immobile? There's nothing about inhabiting the house.

In essence, not every verb-preposition pair is a phrasal verb; especially if you can move the preposition away like you just did and it changes meaning, it is. If it doesn't, it isn't.

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  • +1, I think Alphonso XIII would have liked this answer :) –  Feb 02 '13 at 21:42
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    I think the distinction you draw is correct> However, where I come from the transitive 'phrasal verb' would be move into the house; move in is an intransitive expression which would not work here. – StoneyB on hiatus Feb 02 '13 at 21:58
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    @StoneyB And even then, into which they have moved is still correct. Even that is not a true phrasal verb. – Andrew Leach Feb 02 '13 at 22:09
  • @AndrewLeach Phrasal verb is used differently by different grammarians; I think it's very relevant here that Wikipedia says "Modern theories of syntax tend to use the term phrasal verb to denote particle verbs only; they do not view prepositional verbs as phrasal verbs. The ESL literature (English as a second language), in contrast, tends to employ the term phrasal verb to encompass both prepositional and particle verbs." But live in is neither. – StoneyB on hiatus Feb 02 '13 at 22:13
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    Perhaps a more definitely "phrasal verb" such as try out (to test, sample) would have illustrated the case better. There's no doubt that Alphonso XIII, whose house several generation of students have now tried out is at least "credible", whereas Alphonso XIII, out whose house several generation of students have now tried is simply gibberish. – FumbleFingers Feb 02 '13 at 22:40