Aspektualität in deutschen Partikel- und Präfixverben

Prefix and particle verbs are part of a systematic way of expressing aspectual structures in German. This article proposes an aspectual analysis of German particle and prefixed verbs, regarding especially their polysemic characteristics, and will give a contrastive comparison with the Italian language. This can be useful given that Italian does not have developed a system of prefixes and particles as German does. Therefore, the Italian translations of German prefixed and particle verbs turns out to use different kinds of expressions, often of a periphrastic nature. This is seen here as an indication in favour of the strongly polysemic verbs in German. The aspectual comparison of both languages will be done using an onomasiological model of aspectuality, which allows the analysis of different kinds of expressions without using specific formal categories. The first part of this article gives a short introduction and definition of the German verbs. Part two concerns the question of what aspectuality in German is, followed by part three, a quick overview of actual research in the field. Part four explains how a contrastive perspective may be helpful to discover and illuminate the polysemic German prefixed and particle verbs. Part five presents the empirical data used for the purpose of this work. Part six, then, contains the aspectual analysis of the German verbs in their given context. Every German example will be described and compared to its Italian translation. The article will close with a quick summary of the results, focussing especially on the usefulness of a contrastive approach.

Bracketing Paradoxes resolved

Bracketing Paradoxes (BPs) have been the subject of many different analyses since the 1970s. Each of these analyses have included BP-specific machinery to account for the apparent mismatch between the syntactico-semantic and morpho-phonological structures argued to be necessary for a complete analysis of this phenomenon. This article proposes that independently necessary operations and structures in the morpho-syntactic and phonological modules allow for an analysis of BPs that avoids postulating ad-hoc tools. Specifically, a system that includes cyclic (phasal) interpretation of the morpho-syntax in combination with a flat (CVCV) phonological framework avoids the emergence of paradoxical structures altogether. The discussion therefore includes both current morpho-syntactic and phonological analyses of each construction proposed to give rise to a BP; comparatives (unhappier), Level-ordering BPs (ungrammaticality), Phrasal BPs (modular grammarian), Compound BPs (particle physicist), Particle-verbs (podžëg ‘set fire’ [Russian]), and Reduplicated BPs (kwíita-kwíita ‘to pour a bit’ [Kihehe]). The proposal that a flat phonological framework is key in avoiding the paradoxical nature of BPs has implications for the correct structure of phonological representations generally.

Different sources of convergent patterns in the Alps

The diffusion of particle-verbs in Rhaeto-Romance and Italo-Romance dialects is surveyed on the basis of a selection of 13 AIS maps presenting the responses to 12 input sentences referring to different events. Particle-verbs are more frequent in the coding of motion than non-motion events. The geographic diffusion appears to be biased towards the Central and the Eastern Alps and the Central Po Plain. The distribution of particle-verbs is shown to correlate with the presence of systems of topographical deixis and to result from processes of language shift from Romance to Germanic in the mountains. Diffusion in the plain has resulted from inter-dialectal contact along cross-Alpine trade routes.

Stå på, ikke gi opp – the use of Norwegian particle verbs in email messages by advanced L2 users whose L1 is Finnish

The aim of the present study is to examine similarities and differences in the use of particle verbs (PVs) between advanced bilingual L2 users of Norwegian (L1 Finnish) in their teens and Norwegian L1 speakers of the same age. The data consists of three writing tasks (email messages) written by 6 bilingual Finnish -Norwegian participants and 6 native speakers of Norwegian. Previous research has shown that second language (L2) users, who are highly advanced, face problems using multi-word expressions. For example, they tend to use less PVs than native speakers. The advanced bilingual L2 users of Norwegian (L1 Finnish) in the present study also show a slight tendency to use fewer PVs than the native speakers. However, the Finnish-Norwegian participants used some more idiomatic PVs than the native speakers of Norwegian. The results show that advanced bilingual users of Norwegian who live in an L2 environment and receive a great amount of natural input and output from an early age utilized PVs in a manner congruent to native speakers. Despite differences between the Finnish and Norwegian languages, there are also similarities with regard to PVs. The bilingual participants are familiar with PVs in their first language, Finnish, and they may benefit from that, even though these verbs are not as frequent in Finnish as in Norwegian.

Afrikaans circumpositions

Circumpositions in Afrikaans present several puzzles: (i) they always encode spatial paths, but spatial paths can also be encoded by prepositional phrases; (ii) they can be doubling or non-doubling, and (iii) they exhibit disharmonic word order of the kind that appears to violate the Final-over-Final Condition (FOFC). In this paper, I argue that circumpositions offer support for the existence of a directional head [dir] in the fine structure of the Afrikaans verbal domain, and that this head is lexicalised by adpositional material in circumpositional expressions. I show that Afrikaans grammar distinguishes Route-paths from Goal-/Source-paths, and argue that whereas [dir] selects a [pathP] in the structure underlying Goal-/Source-paths (circumpositional expressions), Route-paths (prepositional expressions) are ‘bare’ [pathP] structures. I argue that since circumpositions identify structural components in different Spellout Domains, double-insertion of adposition-like material is required to exhaustively lexicalise the structure, and the disharmonic word order is understood as a direct consequence of the fact that [dir] is located in Afrikaans’ head-final verbal, which addresses the concern arising around FOFC. Finally, given that the adpositions in circumpositional expressions are shown to occupy structural positions that are distinct from that of de-adpositional V-particles, the paper also addresses the structural relation between circumpositions and particle verbs in which adposition-like material lexicalises a resultative [res] node in the verbal domain.

Do particle verbs share a representation with their root verbs? Evidence from structural priming

Many languages have particle verbs like meegeven in Dutch, in which a particle (“mee”, with) sometimes appears independently from the root verb (“geven”, give). To investigate whether particle verbs and their root verbs share a lexical-syntactic (lemma) representation, we tested whether structural priming (the tendency for speakers to repeat sentence structure) is boosted by lexical overlap between prime and target verbs. Priming was larger with repetition of the identical verb than with root-only repetition and larger with particle-only repetition than without lexical repetition. These findings support a dual-lemma representation for particle verbs: one lemma represents the verb-particle combination (separately from the root), another lemma represents the particle (shared with other particle verbs). Finally, priming was larger from root to particle verb than between two different particle verbs with identical roots, suggesting that particle-verb lemmas are connected to their root-verb lemmas but not to each other.

The development of synthetic compounds in German: Relating diachrony with L1 acquisition

The development of synthetic compounds with deverbal heads in German, namely nominalizations with ung (such as Kindererziehung ‘child education’) and the nominalized infinitive (such as Eierlegen ‘laying of eggs’) has not been studied for language acquisition, due to their late emergence and the poor documentation in later acquisition stages. The historical emergence of synthetic compounding has had little attention. Our aim is to bring together both ‘emergence-driven’ perspectives for investigating what formal properties of synthetic compounding can be observed from the perspective of the most frequent nominalization patterns of present-day German for abstract nouns. The theoretical comparison shows that both developments (child language development and the historical development) display an increase in morphological complexity: while both kinds of nominalizations start with simple verbs, prefix and particle verbs follow. In a next step, the nominalization patterns are widened in favor of complex bases.