Sub-lexical investigations: German particles, prefixes and prepositions

Abstract

The papers investigate constructions with P(repositional) elements in German. It aims at a comprehensive theory of the syntax-semantics interface for the different verbal constructions in German, including verb plus prepostional phrase, (separable) particle verbs, and (inseparable) prefix verbs. The constructions are given syntactic representations following minimalist principles as known from \textit{Distributive Morphology} (DM) according to which a single syntactic engine drives formation of both words and phrases. Among the syntactic principles the Split-P hypothesis plays a central role. A crucial feature of the approach is that the syntactic structures are used as input to the computation of semantic representations according to principles of Discourse Representation Theory (DRT). Several challenges that present themselves for a compositional theory of word- and phrase- formation with P-elements in German are accounted for in the paper: syntactic separability of verb-particle constructions vs non-separability of prefix-verbs; semantic restrictions in the P-elements to build constructions of the former and the latter type; syntactic alternations w.r.t. the realisation of figure and ground arguments and the semantic basis of these alternations. A particular challenge are the differences in the conceptual and aspectual contribution of the same prepositional root in different syntactic contexts.