Is it correct to change the common structure in these phrasal verbs?

I just read a book to learn English. And the topic I read is about the phrasal verbs, but a big doubt has come up to my mind.

Is it correct to change the position of the preposition (putting it with the verb instead of after the direct object)?

As in:

Common structure:

  • My wife backs me up over my decision to quit my job.

  • We have to blow 50 balloons up for the party.

  • I need to break these shoes in before we run next week.

  • Please help me out to get this job done.

So, would it be correct to do the following:

  • My wife backs up me over my decision to quit my job.

  • We have to blow up 50 ballons for the party.

  • I need to break in these shoes before we run next week.

  • Please help out me to get this job done.


Solution 1:

Some rules of thumb:

  • if the preposition indicates a genuine "direction" or essentially carries its 'intrinsic value' as a preposition, then it comes before the noun or pronoun as you would expect with a preposition. For example: He turned off the motorway. He ran out the room. Notice how in these cases, you can often take away the prepositional phrase and the sentence still more or less makes sense, though is much more vague ("He turned", "He ran").
  • If the preposition is effectively "fused" into a transitive verb, and especially where the choice of preposition is fairly arbitrary, then it is likely that will come before a noun (but after a pronoun). He carried out the experiment. He carried it out. Contrast: He carried the boxes out, when out has its more literal meaning, and notice how "He carried" bears no relationship at all to the sense with 'experiment', but bears some relationship with the sense of carrying boxes.
  • With some prepositions that have a "semi-figurative" sense but still keeps some of its value of the preposition, you can put the preposition before or after a noun, arguably depending on whether you want to the emphasise 'directionality' of the preposition: He turned off the tap or He turned the tap off.
  • A "figurative" preposition fused into a transitive phrasal verb is in any case likely to come before the noun phrase if it is relatively long. So for example: He turned the taps off would be common, but He turned off [all of the taps in the house as well as the house next door] would be a common word order because of the length of the object phrase in brackets.
  • If you coordinate prepositions that are fused into a phrasal verb, then they usually go after the nouns. For example, He turned the taps off and the washing machine on is fine, but you can't generally say *He turned off the taps and on the washing machine, even though individually you can say either He turned off the taps or He turned on the washing machine. (With "genuine" prepositions, coordination works as expected: He turned off the motorway and onto the ring road.)

Solution 2:

Particle movement is possible with phrasal verbs when they are transitive, as is the case with all your examples. However, when the object of a transitive phrasal verb is a pronoun, the particle is almost always placed after the object. That means that My wife backed up me and Please help out me do not occur, but both forms of the other two sentences can.