Verb-Particle Explorations (review)

The aim of the book is to provide analyses of Germanic constructions known as verb-particle constructions, phrasal verbs, particle verbs, and the like from different perspectives. The following articles present syntactic, morphological, and semantic analyses of particle verbs. Geert Booij, ‘Separable complex verbs in Dutch: A case of periphrastic word formation’ (21–41), discusses the behavior of particle verbs and introduces the idea of periphrastic word formation. Booij treats particle verbs as constructional idioms. Bert Cappelle, ‘And up it rises: Particle preposing in English’ (43–66), using examples, analyzes grammatical constraints on particle preposing and identifies different functions of such constructions (e.g. ‘focus preposing’, ‘presentative preposing’, ‘proposition affirmation’). Ray Jackendoff, ‘English particle constructions, the lexicon, and the autonomy of syntax’ (67–94), presents an overview of the basic facts of English particle verbs and distinguishes between verb-particle idioms and directional, aspectual particles, ‘time-away constructions’, verb-particle idioms with out, and NP + Particle constructions. He suggests that the particles in these constructions have identical syntax (the autonomy of syntax) and argues against a binary branching hypothesis in favor of a triply-branching VP.

Andrew McIntyre, ‘Idiosyncrasy in particle verbs’ (95–118), claims that idiosyncratic particle verbs are derived by composition of the meanings of particle and verb and discusses noncompositional particle verbs, suggesting that the latter are licensed by idiosyncratic rules. Stefan Müller, ‘Syntax or morphology: German particle verbs revisited’ (119–39), argues that the fronting of particles is possible in German and suggests a syntactic analysis of particle verbs where particles are treated as part of the predicate complex. Ad Neeleman, ‘Particle placement’ (141–64), presents word order data in English and Dutch and argues that these languages are ‘identical in all relevant respects’ and different only in the setting of the OV/VO parameter. Neeleman suggests complex predicate analysis for the particle verbs in English and Dutch. Fabrice Nicol, ‘Extended VP-shells and the verb-particle construction’ (165–90), suggests an extended VP-shell analysis of particle verbs (a modified version of Richard Larson’s proposal) and differentiates split constructions (V + NP + Particle) and merged constructions (V + Particle + NP), proposing structures and analyses for these types of constructions. Ida Toivonen, ‘Swedish particles and syntactic projection’ (191–209), analyzes Swedish particle verbs and argues that Swedish particles are nonprojecting words. Jaap Van Marle, ‘Dutch separable compound verbs: Words rather than phrases?’ (221–32), studies Dutch separable and defective compound verbs from a morphological point of view, arguing that these sets of verbs are morphological entities. Jochen Zeller, ‘Particle verbs are heads and phrases’ (233–67), analyzes particle verbs in Dutch, English, German, and Norwegian and suggests that particle verbs can be represented as heads and phrases. Zeller discusses the status of particle verbs from different theoretical perspectives (incorporation, parallel morphology, and autolexical syntax).

A few of the articles analyze particle verbs from statistical and psycholinguistic points of view. Stefan Gries, ‘The influence of processing on syntactic variation: Particle placement in English’ (269–88), studies the factors which can influence the choice of using V-Prt-NP or V-NP-Prt constructions. He proposes the processing hypothesis in order to explain the speaker’s choice for a particular construction. Dieter Hillert and Farrell Ackerman, ‘Accessing and parsing phrasal predicates’ (289–313), review some psycholinguistic analyses of Germanic and Hungarian particle verbs and examine the word-/ sentence-level processing of verb-particle constructions during comprehension. Anke Lüdeling and Nivja de Jong, ‘German particle verbs and word formation’ (315–33), review the status of particle verbs and argue that particle verbs are phrasal and not distinguishable from similar constructions. Testing the comprehension of particle verbs, they observe that opaque and transparent particle verbs have formal access representations in the mental lexicon...