Talk by Cora Pots-Cavirani & Mike Putnam

Cora Pots-Cavirani and Mike Putnam will give a talk with the title Prefixoids ≠ Prefixes: Not all inseparable verbal compounds are (underlyingly) the same

Date/time: 1 May, 16:00 (Utrecht Time)

Location: Zoom

pwd: please ask Mike Putnam

Abstract

In this presentation, we take a closer look at two subtypes of inseparable verbal compounds in Dutch: (i) Prefixoid-verb compounds (PVCs), i.e., those modified by p- and a-elements such as om, over, mis, weer, and vol, and (ii) Prefix-verb compounds (IVCs), i.e., those modified by prefixes such as ver-, ont-, and be-. After comparing these two subtypes by means of a variety of tests (e.g., the category of the right-hand member, V2-position, perfect participle form, resultativity, and transitivity), we adopt an exoskeletal, first-phase analysis of these structures along the lines of Ramchand (2008 et seq.) that is amendable to most late-insertion approaches to the syntax-morphology interface. In connection with our theoretical treatment of these subtypes of inseparable verbal compounds we discuss why N seems to never become a prefixoid and how these ‘pseudo’-compounds related to more established analyses of compounds (Harley, 2009; Eik, 2019). Finally, we advance a working structural analysis of ‘prefixoids’, as well as how this treatment relates more generally to the structure of particle verbs in Dutch and beyond.