Verb plus prepositional particle

A prepositional verb consists of a verb plus a particle which is clearly a preposition: for example, look at, send for, rely on. These are mostly lexically single-stressed, with the primary stress going on the verb. Thus 'look at has the same stress pattern as 'edit or 'borrow. The second element, the preposition, being unstressed, does not get accented (unless for contrastive focus). If the nucleus comes on a prepositional verb, the word on which the nucleus is located is typically the verb itself.

This happens particularly on certain constructions which leave the preposition stranded (= without any following noun phrase). Typical cases are passivization, relative clauses, and wh questions. The preposition then goes in the tail, although phonetically it retains its strong form:

Again, there are a few exceptions. In particular, preposition of more than on syllables tend to be stressed: ,look 'after is (for most speakers) double-stressed, and so is ,do with'out. So we say:

In any case, when there is contrastive focus, implicit or explicit, the nucleus can readily go on the preposition:

There are also phrasal verbs that include both an adverbial particle and a preposition, e.g go along with, look down on. These are double-stressed, e.g ,go a'long with. When one of these is the last lexical item in focus, the nucleus goes on the adverbial particle, as expected: