On Tuesday, Geert Booij will give a talk as part of the GSAS Workshop in Language Universals and Linguistic Fieldwork:
Speaker: Geert Booij (Visiting Erasmus lecturer from Universiteit Leiden)
Title: ‘Noun incorporation and particle verbs in Dutch: a challenge for linguistic models’
Time: Tuesday, April 6th, 5:30-7pm
Location: Boylston Hall 104
Verbs with noun incorporation such as adem-halen to breathe and
particle verbs such as aan-vallen to attack look like complex verbs,
and they do behave as lexical units in a number of ways. They often
have idiosyncratic meanings, and feed word formation. Dutch
orthography requires them to be written as one word. Yet, the two
parts are separable in root clauses, as in:
- Jan haalt zwaar adem John breathes heavily
- De tijger viel ons aan The tigre attacked us
Such separable complex verbs are therefore phrasal in nature, but
they have a number of properties that distinguish them partially from
what the regular syntax of Dutch predicts. Hence, they have to be
analysed as cases of optional syntactic compounding.Their phrasal structure corresponds with specific meanings. Noun
incorporation evokes the meaning of conventional action. The word door
through used as a particle expresses continuative aspect, as in
door-gaan lit. through-go, to continue.The existence of these separable complex verbs therefore implies a
lexicon with a set of phrasal constructional idioms, phrasal
constructions of the type [X V],with the X position lexically
specified. Hence, there is no sharp boundary between lexicon and
syntax, unlike what many models of grammar assume.