den Dikken (1995): Particles #

This file formalizes the analysis of verb-particle constructions in chapter 2 of den Dikken's Particles. A particle is an ergative, non-lexical preposition heading a small clause in the verb's complement, so the "object" of a verb-particle construction originates as the particle's complement and receives no Case from it. The noun phrase is licensed in one of two ways. It raises to the specifier of the particle's small clause, where the verb governs it, which gives the outer order V-NP-Prt; or it stays in situ and receives the verb's Case through reanalysis of verb and particle, an abstract incorporation that extends the verb's government by Baker's Government Transparency Corollary, which gives the inner order V-Prt-NP. Reanalysis fails when the particle's complement is a barrier, a nominal or adjectival small clause, when the noun phrase is a weak pronoun, and when the particle carries a bare modifier such as right; placing the particle after the predicate of the small clause has no derivation at all. The predicate of that small clause extracts only across a verb-particle complex, the sole lexical governor of its trace.

Norwegian complex particle constructions pattern exactly as the English ones do, which den Dikken takes to show that the analysis belongs to the core theory. Languages differ instead in whether the particle may also incorporate overtly and surface as a prefix on the verb: never in English, in the passive in Norwegian and Swedish, and in the active as well in Danish. The chapter's English, Norwegian, Swedish and Danish examples are the rows of Examples.all, and the calculus predicts the judgment of every row it covers.

Main definitions #

Complement: the particle's complement, an object or a small clause headed by a lexical category.
Strategy, Strategy.placement: raising, reanalysis and overt incorporation, and the placement of the particle each yields.
Licensed, Derivable: the strategies a configuration licenses and the placements it derives.
PredicateExtractable, PredicateExtractableFrom: extraction of the predicate of the inner small clause, by strategy and by placement.
Language.incorporates, participleContext: the voices, Voice.active or Voice.passive, in which a language incorporates its particles overtly, Norwegian's read off the contexts that take the compound participle in Norwegian.Verb.participle.

Main results #

derivable_inner_iff, derivable_outer, not_derivable_final, derivable_prefixed_iff: the placements a configuration derives.
complex_paradigm, weak_pronoun_outer_only, modified_outer_only: the chapter's paradigms.
predicateExtractableFrom_iff: the predicate extracts exactly from a derivable non-outer placement.
rows_derivable, rows_predicateExtraction, rows_subextraction: every English and Norwegian row is judged as the calculus predicts.
rows_prefixed: every prefixed particle is judged by the voices its language incorporates in.
norwegian_incorporates: Norwegian incorporates in the passive only, as the chapter states.
rows_participle: Åfarli's sparke ut rows show the participle the fragment gives for their auxiliary exactly when they are judged acceptable.

Implementation notes #

The calculus is stated over the parameters the chapter's principles read, not over trees: the particle's complement, with the infinitival marker to counted prepositional; whether the object is a weak pronoun; whether the particle carries a bare modifier; and whether overt incorporation is available. Overt incorporation is the third strategy, licensed by the language and the voice alone, and the extracted predicate's trace is taken to be governed by the overtly incorporated complex as by the reanalysed one, a point the chapter has no data on. Danish has no inner order, which the chapter records without deriving, so the Danish rows enter only rows_prefixed. The Norwegian prefixed forms, utsparka after vart and not after har, are the compound participles of the reference grammar, which puts them after være and bli and not after ha whatever the voice, so the voices Norwegian incorporates in are read off the fragment through the auxiliary each voice has in the rows, and the sparke ut rows are checked against the forms the fragment conjugates. The Bokmål rows were constructed and judged by Arnfinn Vonen and Alma Næss for den Dikken; the Nynorsk rows are Åfarli's. The arguments from small-clause constituency, from verb-particle idioms and from the ergativity of the particle, and Herslund's observation that Danish incorporation is lexically conditioned, are recorded in the rows and not formalized.

den Dikken (1995): Particles #

Main definitions #

Main results #

Implementation notes #

References #

The English paradigms #

Extraction of the predicate of the inner small clause #

Overt incorporation across languages #

The rows #