Complex Predicates: Verbal Complexes, Resultative Constructions, and Particle Verbs in German

by Stefan Müller

Complex Predicates examines a number of linguistic phenomena—including auxiliary and verb combinations, causative constructions, predicatives, depictive secondary predicates, and particle and verb combinations—and uses scrambling and fronting data to determine that all except the depictive secondary predicates should be treated as complex predicates. Müller's analysis of inflection and derivation is compatible with syntactical analysis of particle verbs; as a byproduct, it also solves the particle verb bracketing paradox often discussed in the literature.

482 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2002

About the author

Stefan Müller, Humboldt Universität zu Berlin
Stefan Müller studied Computer Science, Computational Linguistics and Linguistics at the Humboldt University at Berlin and in Edinburgh. He worked at the German Research Center of Artificial Intelligence (DFKI) in Saarbrücken and for the company Interice. He worked as acting chair for German and Computational Linguistics in Jena and for Theoretical Computational Linguistics in Potsdam. He had an assistant professorship in Bremen for theoretical linguistics and computational linguistics, a full professorship for German and General Linguistics at the Freie Universität Berlin and is now professor for German language with specialization in syntax at the Humboldt Universität zu Berlin.

His main re­search topic is Ger­man gram­mar. He works both em­pir­i­cal­ly and the­o­ret­i­cal­ly. Top­ics of in­ter­est are mor­phol­o­gy, syn­tax, se­man­tics, and in­for­ma­tion struc­ture. He pub­lished main­ly about Ger­man, but he also works on other lan­guages as for in­stance Man­darin Chi­nese, Dan­ish, Mal­tese, and Per­sian. The the­o­ret­i­cal work is car­ried out in the frame­work of Head-​ Driv­en Phrase Struc­ture Gram­mar (HPSG) and the the­o­ret­i­cal anal­y­ses are im­ple­ment­ed in com­put­er-​pro­cess­able gram­mar frag­ments. The gram­mar frag­ments that are implemented in the CoreGram Project use a com­mon core. One goal of his re­search is to un­der­stand lan­guage and to find out what lan­guages in gen­er­al and cer­tain lan­guage class­es in par­tic­u­lar have in com­mon.

Stefan^^^Müller