Morphosyntactic Change: A comparative study of particles and prefixes.

Bettelou Los, Corrien Blom , Geert Booij, Marion Elenbaas, Ans van Kemenade

Research output: Book/ReportBook

Abstract / Description of output

Particle verbs (two separate words constituting a single lexical unit) 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 we say He looked it up but not 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.
Original languageEnglish
PublisherCambridge University Press
Number of pages266
ISBN (Electronic)9781139415590
ISBN (Print)9781107012639
Publication statusPublished - May 2012

Publication series

NameCambridge Studies in Linguistics
PublisherCambridge University Press
No.134

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