This dissertation investigates the relationship between pairs of constructions in Swedish involving a reflexive preposition phrase such as med sig ‘with oneself’. Expressions such as ta med sig väskan ‘bring along the bag’ can occasionally be rearranged without a change in meaning, as in ta väskan med sig, though this word order alternation is not entirely free. While the existing literature has often noted the peculiarity of the former variant, its paraphrasability with the latter variant has been largely unexplored. Drawing on the usage-based constructionist approach, which sees a construction, or a form–meaning pairing, as a basic unit of grammar, the study aims to identify the range of usages of the two variants – the verb-particle construction (VPC) and the post-objective construction (POC) – and to shed light on their relation within linguistic convention.

The study focuses on cases in which the VPC and the POC appear with a lexical object and contain one of four frequent prepositions: av ‘off’, i ‘in’, med ‘with’, and på ‘on’. The empirical data consist of two types. Blog corpus data from 2016 were used to identify the range of usages of the VPC and the POC in naturally occurring data. Acceptability judgement data were collected through a formal experiment conducted online to examine the conventionality of the overlaps observed in the corpus.

The analysis of the corpus data shows that, although recurrent overlaps are found in two pairs of subconstructions, the VPC and the POC generally differ remarkably in lexical variability and semantic features. The VPC is lexically variable and prototypically resultative, whereas the POC is lexically highly constrained and prototypically stative. Moreover, the semantically equivalent, overlapping subconstructions are not pragmatically equivalent. Specifically, the POC with the stative verb ha ‘have’ co-occurs significantly more often with a shorter object. Furthermore, the POC with dynamic verbs is infrequent and significantly less acceptable than the VPC. These quantitative differences indicate that the POC variant is more constrained in usage than the VPC variant, making the variants pragmatically non-equivalent.

While the findings indicate that the VPC and the POC are two distinct argument structure constructions with specific word orders, the existence of recurrent overlaps between them suggests that the VPC and the POC may be related and could be abstracted into an argument structure construction without word order specification, or a constructeme, at some highly specific levels.

Overall, the study makes both empirical and theoretical contributions. Empirically, the study delivers a description of the VPC and the POC that specifies the conditions under which the VPC and the POC are chosen. The results are particularly interesting in light of earlier research on Swedish particles, which suggested that Swedish particles are limited to the VPC order and to a resultative meaning. Under the assumption that sequences such as med sig comprise complex particles, the present study provides a nuanced syntactic and semantic characterisation of these types of particles. Theoretically, the study presents a case study of the horizontal relations between formally distinct, yet similar, constructions within constructional networks, offering a means of relating argument structure constructions to other linguistic levels, such as individual lexical items and more general word order patterns.