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.
The Semantics of German Verb Prefixes is the most comprehensive study ever undertaken in this area of German grammar. Using an extensive collection of naturally occurring data, the author proposes an ...image-schematic interpretation for each of the productive prefixes be-, ver-, er-, ent-, zer-, um-, über-, unter-, and durch-. These abstract semantic patterns underlie a remarkable range of particular meanings, and they consistently account for subtle contrasts between prefixed verbs and alternative constructions such as simple verbs, particle verbs, and verbs with other prefixes. Furthermore, the author develops a schematic meaning for the prefixed verb construction itself. This grammatical meaning reflects the interpreter's perspective and attentional focus as the objective event is imagined to unfold. Underlying all of these proposals is a novel conception of meaning as a dynamic and flexible process with a constantly active role for the interpreter. This volume will be of great value to cognitive linguists as well as scholars and students of German who want to gain insights into a central and puzzling part of the morphosyntax and semantics of the German language.
This series consists of collected volumes and monographs about specific issues dealing with interfaces among the subcomponents of linguistic structure: phonology-morphology, phonology-syntax, ...syntax-semantics, syntax-morphology, and syntax-lexicon. Recent linguistic research has recognized that the subcomponents of grammar interact in non-trivial ways. What is currently under debate is the actual range of such interactions and their most appropriate representation in grammar, and this is precisely the focus of this series. Specifically, it provides a general overview of various topics by examining them through the interaction of grammatical components. The books function as a state-of- the-art report of research.
Abstract
This paper concerns the verbal diminutive suffixes
-el
and
-er
in Afrikaans. In previous work (
Cavirani-Pots et al. 2023
), these suffixes have been analysed on par with their Dutch ...counterparts. In this paper we present the results of a nonsense word experiment on these suffixes in Afrikaans (94 participants) and Dutch (242 participants). The results show that the Afrikaans participants significantly underperform in guessing the meaning of these suffixes compared to the Dutch participants. We take this to mean that the underlying structure of verbs containing these suffixes is different in the two languages. Based on the three-way division of affix types of
Creemers et al. (2018)
, we follow
Cavirani-Pots et al. (2023)
’s analysis of the Dutch
-el
and
-er
suffixes as being level Ia suffixes, i.e. suffixes that appear right above the stem they attach to. For Afrikaans, however, we propose that
-el
and
-er
have lost their suffixal status, and have undergone univerbation with the stem.
In this paper we bring evidence from English and Italian deverbal zero nominals (
>
) that zero is a possible spell-out of a nominalizer otherwise overtly instantiated in suffixed nominals (
). We ...argue in favor of a Distributed Morphology approach, a separationist theory that recognizes and easily implements zero morphology with underlying syntax-semantics. ing away from other theoretical trends and their foundational reasons to refrain from using zero suffixes, we address three properties that have been argued to fundamentally distinguish zero nominals from overtly suffixed nominals, with the implication that they instantiate a different word formation process: i) realization of verbal argument structure, ii) possibility of embedding verbalizing suffixes, and iii) semantic transparency in relation to the verb. By means of corpus data and two manually collected datasets of 561 English and 174 Italian zero nominals based on lexicographic information, we bring solid evidence against these claims, by arguing that: i) a great proportion of zero nominals do realize verbal argument structure, ii) the zero affix may embed verbalizing affixes within the limits of the selectional restrictions it independently imposes on its base, and iii) zero nominals present the same patterns of polysemy that suffixed nominals display. However, we show that zero nominals also present some idiosyncrasies to the extent that not all of them express compositional event readings with argument structure, a matter that deserves further research within the frame of their competition with suffixed nominals.
The book series Linguistische Arbeiten (LA) publishes high-quality work in linguistics that addresses current issues in synchrony and diachrony, theoretically or empirically oriented.
This study aims at testing the Iraqi EFL learners' recognition and production of the derivational suffixes in English and namely, noun, verb, adjective, and adverb. It is hypothesized that the Iraqi ...EFL learners find difficulty in forming new correct parts of speech from the roots due to their unsureness of the suitable derivational suffixes. Also, they tend to use derivational suffixes with different parts of speech depending on different factors like guessing and generalization. The sample of this study is fourth-year Iraqi students of the Department of English/ College of Education Ibn Rushd/ Universitry of Baghdad of the academic year (2014-2015). To achieve the aim of this study a test, which comprises two questions, has been constructed. A multiple-choice question at the recognition level and a completion question at the production level are constructed. The findings of the test show that Iraqi EFL university learners face difficulty in recognizing and producing the derivational suffixes of different parts of speech. In the light of the results, some conclusions have been drawn and a number of recommendations and suggestions have been presented.
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