Learn English – converting a phrasal verb into a noun

The terms "part of speech", "word class" and "word category" are typically used interchangeably. For a recent, brief and accessible discussion by an eminent linguist, see this paper by David Denison. Each individual word has its own part of speech.

Subject and object are grammatical relations. Grammatical relations are different from parts of speech, because parts of speech do not depend on the role of the word in the sentence, whereas grammatical relations do. For instance, in the sentence Cats like mice, the words cats and mice are both nouns, but Cats is the subject whereas mice is the direct object. In the sentence Mice like cats, it is the other way round: mice is the subject whereas cats is the direct object.

An important difference between parts of speech and grammatical relations is that phrases can bear grammatical relations, but only words can bear parts of speech. In the sentence The cats like the mice, the subject is the whole phrase The cats. The word cats is a noun, and The is an article or a determiner.

If you want to find out more about these notions, I'd recommend the book Introducing English Grammar by Börjars and Burridge (2010). It's what we use at Manchester to teach first-year Linguistics and English Language undergraduates.

It's not that you 'can't place pronouns after any phrasal verb'. It only happens with certain ones.

There are two types of phrasal verbs:

1. prepositional verbs
2. particle verbs

If the construction is verb + preposition, the object, noun or pronoun can't split the phrasal verb:

• You should stand by your friend¹
• You should stand by him

But not

• *You should stand your friend by.
• *You should stand him by.

These constructions are wrong because the preposition must come first to introduce the prepositional phrase.

If the construction is verb + particle, the object can split the phrsal verb if it's a noun, and must split it if it's a pronoun

• You should think over the matter.²

• You should think the matter over.

• You should think it over.

• but not, *You should think over it.

The last construction isn't used because the it causes confusion. Over could be interpreted as a preposition, which it isn't. Since there isn't an NP to disambiguate that it is a matter (and not a table), we place the pronoun before the particle.

EDIT: I should make it clear that you can't put a pronoun after a particle verb.

@Mari suggested that both of these are right but mean different things

• "He looked me over"
• "He looked over me"

Both are correct, but only the first one uses the phrasal verb 'look over'. The second sentence doesn't have a phrasal verb, and uses 'look' and 'over' in their normal senses. The construct has a valid meaning in this case, but it might not be so in case of every particle verb.

Essentialy, if you add the pronoun after the particle, it would either be nonsensical or mean something completely different than the phrasal verb sense intended.

¹ by is a preposition here, introducing the PP 'by your friend'

² over is a particle here, because it does not take a complement