Use policyThe full-text may be used and/or reproduced, and given to third parties in any format or medium, without prior permission or charge, for personal research or study, educational, or not-for-pro t purposes provided that:• a full bibliographic reference is made to the original source • a link is made to the metadata record in DRO • the full-text is not changed in any way The full-text must not be sold in any format or medium without the formal permission of the copyright holders.Please consult the full DRO policy for further details. We present an ab initio dynamics investigation within a density-functional perturbation theory framework of the properties of the conjugated polymer poly-para-phenylene vinylene ͑PPV͒ in both the isolated chain and crystalline states. The calculated results show that for an isolated chain, most of the vibrational modes correspond to experimentally observed modes in crystalline PPV. However, additional hitherto unidentified modes have been observed in experiment and our calculations on crystalline material have allowed us to assign these. We also present the results of calculations of the polarizability and permittivity tensors of the material, which are in reasonable agreement with the typical values for conjugated polymers. Dynamical Born effective charges ͓S. Baroni, S. de Gironcoli, A. Dal Corso, and P. Giannozzi, Rev. Mod. Phys. 73, 515 ͑2001͔͒ are calculated and compared with atomic charges obtained from Mulliken population analysis ͓M. D. Segall, C. J. Pickard, R. Shah, and M. C. Payne, Mol. Phys. 89, 571 ͑1996͔͒ and we conclude that effective charges are more appropriate for use in the study of the dynamics of the system. Notable differences are found in the infrared-absorption spectra obtained for the isolated chain and crystalline states, which can be attributed to the differences in the crystalline packing effects, which clearly play a key role in influencing the lattice dynamics of PPV.