Book: Mueller: Complex Predicates

[Tracy Holloway King]

CSLI Publications is pleased to announce the publication of:

COMPLEX PREDICATES: VERBAL COMPLEXES, RESULTATIVE CONSTRUCTIONS, AND
PARTICLE VERBS IN GERMAN, Stefan Müller, (DFKI Saarbrücken and
Friedrich Schiller University), ed.;paper ISBN: 1-57586-386-3,
$35.00, cloth ISBN: 1-57586-385-5, $75.00,  482 pages. CSLI
Publications 2003. http://cslipublications.stanford.edu , email:
pubs at csli.stanford.edu.

To order this book, contact The University of Chicago Press. Call
their toll free order number 1-800-621-2736  (U.S. & Canada only)  or
order online at http://www.press.uchicago.edu/ (use the search
feature to locate the book, then order).

Book description:

This book examines various linguistic phenomena and determines that
certain constructions should be treated as complex predicates.
Specifically, the book explores auxiliary and verb combinations in
future, perfect, and passive constructions; causative constructions;
verb complex constructions with raising and control verbs; subject
and object predicatives; depictive secondary predicates; resultative
constructions; and particle and verb combinations. The properties of
all these constructions are studied on a broad empirical basis,
mainly with data from German.

Using scrambling and fronting data, the author argues that all these
constructions---except the depictive secondary predicates, which are
analyzed as adjuncts---should be treated as complex predicates.  The
potential for a verb to enter a resultative construction or to form a
particle verb that follows a productive pattern is licensed by
lexical rules. Base verb and resultative predicate, and base verb and
particle are combined in syntax by the same rule that licenses verbal
complexes.

Arguments that have been put forward in order to show that particle
verbs have to be treated in the morphology component are discussed
and refuted.  An analysis of inflection and derivation is provided
that is compatible with the syntactic analysis of particle verbs. As
a byproduct, this analysis solves the bracketing paradox with regard
to particle verbs often discussed in the literature.