Morphosyntactic Change A Comparative Study of Particles and Prefixes Cambridge Studies in Linguistics Series

Particle verbs (combinations of two words but lexical units) are a notorious problem in linguistics. Is a particle verb like look up one word or two? It has its own entry in dictionaries, as if it is one word, but look and up can be split up in a sentence: we can say He looked the information up and He looked up the information. But why can't we say He looked up it? In English look and up can only be separated by a direct object, but in Dutch the two parts can be separated over a much longer distance. How did such hybrid verbs arise and how do they function? How can we make sense of them in modern theories of language structure? This book sets out to answer these and other questions, explaining how these verbs fit into the grammatical systems of English and Dutch.

1. Separable complex verbs; 2. The paradox of particle verbs; 3. The synchronic analysis of Dutch SCVs; 4. The diachronic analysis of Dutch SCVs; 5. The lexical decomposition of present-day English verb-particle combinations; 6. The diachrony of the English verb-particle combination; 7. The diachrony of prefixes in West Germanic; 8. Conclusions.

Bettelou Los is a senior lecturer in English linguistics at Radboud University Nijmegen, The Netherlands.
Corrien Blom is a consultant at the Bureau Taal, Beusichem, The Netherlands.
Geert Booij is a professor of linguistics at the University of Leiden, The Netherlands.
Marion Elenbaas is a reader in English linguistics at the University of Leiden, The Netherlands.
Ans van Kemenade is a professor of English linguistics at Radboud University Nijmegen, The Netherlands.