Whamit!

The Weekly Newsletter of MIT Linguistics

Booij @ Harvard, Tues 4/6

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:

  1. Jan haalt zwaar adem ‘John breathes heavily’
  2. 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.