Particle and Prefix Verbs: Insights from the History of Frisian and Other West Germanic Languages

Laura Catharine Smith

1. INTRODUCTION1 The contrast between the so-called prefix verbs, G be+spréchen2 ‘to dis- cuss’, and particle verbs, e.g., G mít+kommen ‘to come along’, has been well documented and discussed for Modern German and Dutch.3 While the particle receives primary stress and is able to separate from its verb, e.g., Ich komme morgen mit ‘I’m coming along tomorrow’, the opposite is true for the prefix verbs, e.g., Wir besprechen das Thema ‘we discuss the theme’, where the prefix is unstressed and remains intact with the verb. Additional differences also arise when the infinitival marker ‘to’ co-occurs. While German zu and Dutch te precede the prefix and its verb, e.g., zu be- spréchen, it is found to intervene between the particle and verb, e.g., mít- zukommen. Despite the iconic nature of these verbs in the modern lan- guages which illustrate the interaction between prosody and syntax, much less research has been devoted to unlocking the development of these verbs in the early history of High German, Low German or Dutch, including Old High German, Old Low Franconian and Old Saxon. Indeed our best in- sights into particle and prefix verbs in the early West Germanic languages stem from the extensive research done on these verbs in Old and Middle

1 This paper extends the analysis proposed for Modern German particle and prefix verbs by Biskup, Putnam and Smith, ‘German Particle and Prefix Verbs at the Syntax- Phonology Interface’. I am grateful to Mike Putnam for fruitful discussions on the topic and to Céline Gaillard, Bethany Daniel, Blair Bateman and Hans Kelling for feedback on earlier drafts. All errors are nevertheless my own. 2 Accent marks have been inserted to indicate stress placement. 3 A variety of research exists on the topic including, for Dutch: Blom, Complex Pre- dicates in Dutch; Booij, ‘Separable Complex Verbs in Dutch’; Booij, The Morphology of Dutch; Koster, ‘Dutch as an SOV Language’; and van Kemenade and Los, ‘Particles and Prefixes in Dutch and English’; for German: Biskup and Putnam, ‘One P with Two Spell-outs: the ent-/aus-Alternation in German’; Stiebels and Wunderlich, ‘Morphology Feeds Syntax: the Case of Particle Verbs’; and Lüdeling and de Jong, ‘German Particle Verbs and Word-Formation’; and in general, Los, Blom, Booij, Elenbaas and van Kemenade, Morphosyntactic Change: a Comparative Study of Particles and Prefixes. 422 Smith

English by researchers such as Pintzuk, van Kemenade and Elenbaas.4 Al- though the particle (or phrasal) verbs, e.g., put it on, look it up, and prefix verbs, e.g., begin, besmirch, found in Modern English, have undergone divergent developments away from the types of particle and prefix verbs found in Old English as well as Modern German and Dutch, the early evi- dence gleaned from Old English demonstrates that the modern languages continue to share the prosodic and morpho-syntactic patterns already at work in the older West Germanic languages. Yet despite all the attention these verb types have received in the litera- ture, discussion of particle and prefix verbs in West Germanic has almost entirely ignored insights from the history of Frisian. This has been particu- larly unfortunate in light of the common occurrence of particle and prefix verbs in both Old and Modern Frisian and more importantly in light of Old Frisian’s later textual record beginning in the thirteenth century, several hundred years after Old English, Old High German and Old Saxon. Based on a very preliminary study of particle and prefix verbs in Old Frisian, I propose in this paper that data from Old Frisian serve as a bridge in our dis- cussion of the older West Germanic data, represented by Old English, and the more modern German and Dutch data. I demonstrate that the analysis previously proposed by Biskup, Putnam and Smith5 to account for prefix and particle verbs in Modern German can be generalised to account for the Frisian data. Indeed, the extension of this analysis to data from earlier West Germanic languages, including in particular Old Frisian, underscores just how stable the interaction between prosody and syntax has remained across the centuries despite other syntactic and prosodic changes impacting the history of these languages. To facilitate this discussion, I draw on the inter- action between the infinitival marker ‘to’ (German zu, Dutch te, Old Frisian to/toe/tho) and the particle and prefix verbs in the various languages as a key criteria for determining whether these preverbal morphemes should be considered either particles or prefixes. Since little research has examined particle and prefix verbs in the history of Frisian, it is my aim that the pre- liminary study presented here will draw attention to the need for future study of the Frisian data. To this end, the paper is organised as follows. In section 2, I discuss particle and prefix verbs from West Germanic and the interplay between prosody and syntax beginning first with data from Modern German and Dutch, languages which are perhaps best known to the reader. From there we turn the clock back to Old English where particle and prefix verbs have been best studied from among the older West Germanic languages. I next

4 Pintzuk, Phrase Structures in Competition; van Kemenade, Syntactic Case and Mor- phological Case in the History of English; and Elenbaas, The Synchronic and Dia- chronic Syntax of the English Verb-Particle Combination. 5 Biskup, Putnam and Smith, ‘German Particle and Prefix Verbs’.