Syntax or Morphology: German Particle Verbs Revisited
Author: Stefan MüllerKey Words: Syntax and Morphologie of German, Particle Verbs
In Nicole Dehé, Ray Jackendoff, Andrew McIntyre, and Silke Urban (Eds.). 2002: Verb-Particle Explorations, Interface Explorations, No. 1, Berlin, New York: Mouton de Gruyter, pages 119–139.
During the past years there has been a debate about whether particle verbs should be analyzed as morphological objects or as syntactic combinations. The most frequently cited arguments for a treatment as morphological objects are:
- Non-transparent particle verbs have to be listed in the lexicon. Therefore they constitute one word.
- In German particles cannot be fronted without their verb.
- The particle cannot be separated from its verb in verb final contexts.
- In certain dialects of German only words can combine with certain prepositions, and since particle verbs can do so, they must be words and have to be treated in morphology.
In the paper, I show that all these claims are empirically wrong. When discussing the data, I will point out similarities of particle verbs with syntactic constructions and finally suggest a syntactic analysis.
- Review of the book by Annie Zaenen
- Review of the book by Nina Rojina 2004 in Language 80 (2): 342–343.