The morphology of German particle verbs

Solving the bracketing paradox

Abstract

The fact that inflectional affixes always attach to the verbal stem leads to the bracketing paradox in the case of particle verbs since the semantic contribution of the inflectional information scopes over the complete particle verb. I will discuss nominalizations and adjective derivation, which are also problematic because of various bracketing paradoxes. I will suggest a solution to these paradoxes that assumes that inflectional and derivational prefixes and suffixes always attach to a form of a stem that contains the information about particles already, but without containing a phonological realization of the particle. The particle is a dependent of the verb and is combined with its head after inflection and derivation. With such an approach no rebracketing mechanisms are necessary.