Particle Verbs and Local Domains

Book excerpt: This book offers a new account of particle verbs in German and Dutch by looking at the conditions under which a non-morphological structure may exhibit “word-like” properties. It shows that although particles are represented as phrasal complements of their verbs, they lack the functional structure which is usually associated with phrases. The author uses the concept of a “local domain”, which can be established by terminal nodes both in syntax and in morphology, to demonstrate why the impoverished syntactic structure of particle verbs shares important features of complex words derived in morphology. The analysis is substantiated through a detailed study of the syntactic, semantic, and morphological properties of particle verbs. Special attention is given to the relevance of local domains for the association of lexical information about sound and meaning with terminal nodes in morphological and syntactic structures.