When Particles Won't Part - CUNY Graduate Center

Marcel den Dikken — When Particles Won’t Part
The fact that the 2-Prt occurs directly on the verb in the Scandinavian double particle examples is quite
remarkable from the point of view of the fact that preverbal particle placement is generally highly restricted
in these languages, as we saw earlier on. It is telling that Vikner (2002) notes for Danish (a language that
seems otherwise somewhat more liberal than the other Mainland Scandinavian languages when it comes to
preverbal particles; cf. (7a,b)) that the particle op occurs to the left of the verb blusse ‘flare’ only in the
presence of an inseparable aspectual particle — that is, while (39) is grammatical, dropping gen- ‘re-’ will
result in ill-formedness with op in preverbal position:
(42) at stridighederne blussede med fornyet styrke (Danish)
that hostilities-the up-flared up with renewed force
What this suggests is that incorporation of the thematic particle into the verb is a last resort strategy
— the particle will stand on its own two feet unless leaving it outside the verb results in a crashing derivation,
as in the case of (33).
(43) incorporation of 2-Prt into V (cf. (21)) is a last resort
(21) [ VP [ V Prt i V] [ PrtP {NP Prt i}]]
That particle incorporation should be a last resort is presumably a reflex of the fact that the structure in (21)
gives the particle a mix of a lexical and a syntactic treatment, involving multiple merger of the particle: it is
attached inside the complex verb in the lexicon but also merged as the head a PrtP in the complement of the
verb. In a way this is like reduplication (except that only one of the copies is spelled out phonologically, so
there is no surface reduplication of the particle). But as Gullì (2002) discusses in detail, genuine cases of
syntactic reduplication are arguably the result of syntactic movement (with spell-out of multiple copies in the
chain) rather than multiple merger. For incorporation I have argued against a movement account (primarily
on grounds of triggerability); incorporation thus seems to involve multiple merger of the same element, with
one copy merged in the word-formation component and the other in syntax. It is the multiplicity of merger in
two different components of the grammar (lexicon and syntax) that seems to be responsible for the last resort
nature of particle incorporation — you should license the particle inside the complement of the verb (via the
XP–complementation structure in (9a), above) if you can, resorting to the structure in (21) only if you are
forced to do so, either because lexical factors so decree (as in the case of Norwegian oppgav in (7b), with
its specialised meaning of ‘report’ ) or because the presence of an inseparable aspectual particle prevents free
syntactic merger of the 2-Prt (cf. (33)). 15
5 When particles won’t part — The V2 restriction on double particle verbs
This said, let us return to the facts in (38)–(41). These are all subordinate clauses, and so are all the Dutch
examples of double particle verbs given in the foregoing discussion. I stuck to subordinate clauses throughout
the discussion so far to suppress the effect of Verb Second. For it turns out that there is something very
peculiar going on with double particle verbs when it comes to Verb Second. While the V2 counterparts of the
Dutch examples in (22a–c) and the German case in (38) are all robustly ungrammatical with fronting of the
complex V to second position (cf. (44) and (45); Höhle 1991, Haider 1993, 2001, Koopman 1995, Vikner 2002,
McIntyre 2002), the Mainland Scandinavian examples in (46)–(48) are all fine (cf. Vikner 2002 on Danish).
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