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From: gary@rochester.UUCP (Gary Cottrell)
Newsgroups: net.nlang
Subject: Re: Final prepositions turn me on.
Message-ID: <6652@rochester.UUCP>
Date: Sat, 28-Apr-84 17:57:17 EDT
Article-I.D.: rocheste.6652
Posted: Sat Apr 28 17:57:17 1984
Date-Received: Sun, 29-Apr-84 08:14:29 EDT
References: <1349@inmet.UUCP>
Organization: U. of Rochester, CS Dept.
Lines: 18

Sorry, this is not new. The fact that you can't say "She turned on me"
and mean "She turned me on" is due to the restriction in English that
you have to move a particle past a pronoun. You could say "She turned
on Bill" and it would be ambiguous between the particle/adverbial PP
readings.

Similarly, you can't say "She called up me", but you can say "She called
up Bill" or "She called Bill up."

Also, there is a distance constraint on moving the particle: It sounds
strange to say "She called the old man she saw yesterday after the dance up."
In fact, one will tend to try to associate "up" with "dance". For an 
interesting pseudo-computational account (pseudo because the details have
not been worked out) of this distance constraint, see "The Sausage Machine"
by Lyn Frazier and Janet Fodor in Cognition, around 1980 or so.

gary cottrell (allegra or seismo)!rochester!gary  or
gary@rochester  (ARPA)