Verb-Particle Constructions

Verb-particle constructions, such as English look out or sober up, combine an open-class word functioning as a verb and a closed-class word whose primary meaning is locative or directional. Students of English grammar know such combinations by the familiar but often more broadly employed term “phrasal verbs,” while for other Germanic languages such as German and Dutch, linguists also use the term “complex verbs,” “compound verbs,” “prefix verbs” or, reflecting that these objects can be split up by other material, “separable (complex) verbs” (versus “inseparable (complex) verbs”). Thus, German das Licht einschalten ‘to switch on the light’ can occur separated, as in ich schaltete das Licht an ‘I switched the light on’—a structure that also exists in English. Another term found in the literature is “particle verbs,” which, like “complex/compound/prefix/separable verbs,” betrays the linguist’s conviction that particle and verb potentially, or even basically, form a morphologically complex word rather than a phrase. However, the analysis of particle verbs as single words is under much debate. The term “verb-particle constructions” is non-committal, as “constructions” can be recognized to exist at the level of both word formation and phrasal syntax. In the abbreviation “VPC,” used throughout this article, the C can moreover refer conveniently either to a construction seen as a morphological or syntactic template or to a concrete combination of a specific verb and a specific particle. The precise status of particles remains hard to pin down. They are not ordinary affixes—at least, whoever treats them thus must be able to account for their ability to be separated from the verb. Particles share certain properties with traditionally defined prepositions, with which they may be homophonous (such as off in fall off a cliff), but they differ from them in not taking a noun phrase complement with which they form a prepositional phrase. Even so, the particle and the preceding direct object noun phrase (e.g., das Licht an) actually have been analyzed as making up a constituent, a “small clause.” While VPCs are a very common phenomenon in Germanic languages, they are not confined to this one language family. In recent decades, several studies have appeared on VPCs in Romance languages, especially in Italian and its regional varieties. There are also descriptions of VPCs in Uralic languages, such as Hungarian, Finnish, and Estonian, and in certain Northern Australian languages, such as Warlpiri. VPCs have been at the center of scholars’ attention in a number of research domains, including theoretical linguistics of various types, historical linguistics, computational linguistics, psycho- and neurolinguistics, and applied linguistics. This bibliography, which covers a wide range of languages, aims to be of interest to linguists of all theoretical persuasions and active in many different fields.