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Solving the bracketing paradox: an analysis of the morphology of German particle verbs

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  31 July 2003

STEFAN MÜLLER
STEFAN MÜLLER
Affiliation:
Language Technology Lab, DFKI GmbH, Saarbrücken
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Abstract

Inflectional affixes are sensitive to morphological properties of the stems of the verbs they attach to. Therefore it is reasonable to assume that the inflectional material is combined with both the verbal stem of simplex verbs and the verbal stem of particle verbs. It has been argued that this leads to a bracketing paradox in the case of particle verbs since the semantic contribution of the inflectional information scopes over the complete particle verb. I will discuss nominalizations and adjective derivation, which are also problematic because of various bracketing paradoxes. I will suggest a solution to these paradoxes that assumes that inflectional and derivational prefixes and suffixes always attach to a form of a stem that already contains the information about a possible particle, but without containing a phonological realization of the particle. As is motivated by syntactic properties of particle verbs, the particle is treated as a dependent of the verb. The particle is combined with its head after inflection and derivation. With such an approach no special mechanisms for the analysis of particle verbs are necessary.

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of Linguistics , Volume 39 , Issue 2 , July 2003 , pp. 275 - 325
Copyright
© 2003 Cambridge University Press

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Footnotes

I have given talks about the morphology of German particle verbs in Tübingen at the Seminar für Sprachwissenschaft, in Stuttgart at the Institut für maschinelle Sprachverarbeitung (IMS), in Potsdam at the Institut für Linguistik/Allgemeine Sprachwissenschaft and at the HPSG 2001 conference in Trondheim. I thank Tübingen, Stuttgart and Potsdam for the invitation and the audiences of all four talks for discussion. Thanks to Berthold Crysmann, Kordula De Kuthy, Peter Gallmann, Anke Lüdeling, Andrew McIntyre, Christine Römer and Hans Uszkoreit for discussion, two anonymous JL referees for comments, and to Kordula De Kuthy, Detmar Meurers, Nicole Dehé, and Anke Lüdeling for supplying me with relevant literature. Thorsten Brants helped me to find the examples that are from the NEGRA corpus. I also want to thank Uta Waller, who helped me translate sample sentences from newspapers. The research carried out for this paper was supported by a research grant from the German Bundesministerium für Bildung, Wissenschaft, Forschung und Technologie (BMBF) to the DFKI project WHITEBOARD ‘Multilevel Annotation for Dynamic Free Text Processing’, FKZ 01 IW 002. The paper was completed at the Institut für Germanistische Sprachwissenschaft of the Friedrich-Schiller-University, Jena.