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Title:
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Particle Verbs, Local Domains and a Theory of Lexical Licensing
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Author:
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Jochen Zeller
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Email:
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click here to access email
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Homepage:
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http://www.jzeller.de
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Degree Awarded:
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Universität Frankfurt
, Department of German Language and Literature
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Degree Date:
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1999
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Linguistic Subfield(s):
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Morphology
Semantics
Syntax
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Subject Language(s):
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Dutch
German, Standard
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Director(s):
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Guenther Grewendorf
Thomas Zimmerman
Ian Roberts
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Abstract:
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The central claim of this book is that a non-morphological syntactic structure may also exhibit 'word-like' properties as long as the terminal nodes of this structure stand in a local relation to each other. This claim is substantiated empirically through a detailed analysis of the syntactic, semantic, and morphological properties of particle verbs in German and Dutch. These so-called 'separable' prefix verbs have properties of both complex words and of syntactic phrases. On the one hand, the particle and the verb behave like independent syntactic elements (for example, they can be split by syntactic movement rules); on the other hand, particle verbs have properties of morphological objects (for example, they provide the input to operations of derivational morphology). The account that I offer analyzes the particle as an impoverished phrasal constituent. Particles project phrasal complements of the verb, but I show that particle phrases, in contrast to 'regular' phrases, are not dominated by a layer of functional structure. Since there is no functional structure intervening between a particle and a verb, a particle verb consists of two lexical heads that are 'structurally adjacent' (with structural adjacency being defined as the relation between a head and the head of its complement). In this sense, the relation between a particle and a verb is more local than the relation between the verb and a lexical head L in other verb-complement constructions, where structural adjacency is destroyed by the functional head of L's extended projection which licenses grammatical properties of L. It is because of the strictly local relation between the particle and the verb that particle verbs pattern in many respects with morphological objects like prefix verbs - both constructions consist of two lexical terminal nodes in a specific local domain.
Furthermore, I show that non-morphological local domains are relevant when it comes to the way lexical information is associated with terminal nodes. In showing how lexical information is associated with (morpho-) syntactic structures, I take issue with so-called 'lexicalist' theories, according to which morphological objects are elements that are 'taken from' the lexicon and 'inserted' into syntax. Instead, I argue that the lexicon has access to syntactic representations formed and constrained by syntactic rules. It is part of the interface between syntax, semantics, and phonology; lexical items link representations of these three components to each other. The way this link is established depends on the structural relations determined by syntax. Importantly, the structures that can be associated with special meanings are not restricted to morphological domains; special meaning may also be determined by the local syntactic environment of the node. Particle verbs may hence exhibit idiosyncratic semantic properties, because the verb and the particle are structurally adjacent and therefore part of the same locality domain.
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