Verb-Particle Constructions: A Linguistic Bibliography

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Verb-Particle Constructions
Bert Cappelle
Associate Professor
University of Lille, CNRS, UMR 8163 - STL - Savoirs Textes Langage
This document is the author version of the published (non-open access) article. On ResearchGate,
users will find zip files containing many of the full texts included in this annotated bibliography.
This bibliography serves as a guide to a highly researched area of grammar, which is marked by
various controversies. It inevitably reflects the author’s particular viewpoints, which readers may either
agree with or find biased. It is hoped, though, that they will also find the bibliography useful. To cite
this bibliographical article or chapter, please use the following format:
Cappelle, Bert. 2023. Verb-particle constructions. In: Mark Aronoff (ed.), Oxford Bibliographies in
Linguistics. New York: Oxford University Press. Doi: 10.1093/OBO/9780199772810-0311
This publication is intended to be regularly revised and updated over the years, and I welcome any
suggestions.
Introduction
General Overviews
VPCs in Germanic Languages
VPCs in English
VPCs in German
VPCs in Dutch
VPCs in Other Germanic Languages
VPCs in Romance Languages
VPCs in Uralic Languages
VPCs in Other Languages
Descriptive Linguistics: Oft-Treated Grammar Issues
Theoretical Linguistics and the Verb-Particle Paradox
VPCs as Complex Verbs
VPCs as Above-Word-Level Constructions
VPCs as Structurally Ambiguous Entities
Beyond the Core Fields
Introduction
Verb-particle constructions, such as English look out or sober up, combine an open-class word
functioning as a verb and a closed-class word whose primary meaning is locative or directional.
Students of English grammar know such combinations by the familiar but often more broadly
employed term “phrasal verbs,” while for other Germanic languages such as German and Dutch,
linguists also use the term “complex verbs”, “compound verbs”, “prefix verbs” or, reflecting that these
objects can be split up by other material, “separable (complex) verbs” (versus “inseparable (complex)
verbs”). Thus, German das Licht einschalten ‘to switch on the light’ can occur separated, as in ich
schaltete das Licht an ‘I switched the light on’ – a structure that also exists in English. Another term
found in the literature is “particle verbs”, which, like “complex/compound/prefix/separable verbs”,
betrays the linguist’s conviction that particle and verb potentially, or even basically, form a
morphologically complex word rather than a phrase. However, the analysis of particle verbs as single
words is under much debate. The term “verb-particle constructions” is non-committal, as
“constructions” can be recognized to exist at the level of both word formation and phrasal syntax. In
the abbreviation “VPC”, used throughout this article, the C can moreover refer conveniently either to a
construction seen as a morphological or syntactic template or to a concrete combination of a specific
verb and a specific particle. The precise status of particles remains hard to pin down. They are not
ordinary affixes – at least, whoever treats them thus must be able to account for their ability to be
separated from the verb. Particles share certain properties with traditionally defined prepositions, with
which they may be homophonous (such as off in fall off a cliff), but they differ from them in not taking a
noun phrase complement with which they form a prepositional phrase. Even so, the particle and the
preceding direct object noun phrase (e.g. das Licht an) actually have been analyzed as making up a
constituent, a “small clause”. While VPCs are a very common phenomenon in Germanic languages,

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they are not confined to this one language family. In recent decades, several studies have appeared
on VPCs in Romance languages, especially in Italian and its regional varieties. There are also
descriptions of VPCs in Uralic languages, such as Hungarian, Finnish and Estonian, and in certain
Northern Australian languages, such as Warlpiri. VPCs have been at the center of scholars’ attention
in a number of research domains, including theoretical linguistics of various types, historical linguistics,
computational linguistics, psycho- and neurolinguistics, and applied linguistics. This bibliography,
which covers a wide range of languages, aims to be of interest to linguists of all theoretical
persuasions and active in many different fields.
General Overviews
A number of works have been published that cover VPCs and related structures in a variety of
languages. Dehé et al. 2002 is a collection of papers that as a whole provides a nice cross-section of
researchers’ diverse theoretical and empirical concerns with VPCs in English, Dutch, German, and
Swedish. Booij and Van Marle 2003 deals with related structures, namely complex predicates made
up of a verb and a “preverb” (a free or bound preverbal morpheme), in other languages as well, such
as Estonian, Old French, Udi, Georgian and Northern Australian languages. For more recent, chapter-
length introductions that contain examples of VPCs in a broad array of languages of a single family,
see Dehé 2015 and Toivonen 2020 for Germanic, and Iacobini 2015 for Romance. There also exist
some freely available online bibliographies on VPCs. These bibliographies have typically been created
as part of the work of funded research projects focusing on VPCs, as in the case of Dehé’s collection,
Verb Particle Constructions: A Bibliography, sometimes together with other types of multi-word
expressions. Masini’s Bibliografia essenziale/Essential bibliography focuses on Italian verb-particle
constructions. Researchers should be aware that bibliographies may be selective and biased toward a
particular theoretical perspective. Also, they may not be up-to-date. (The present bibliographical article
is certainly not intended to be exhaustive, but it does aim to provide a representative sample of the
most important and influential works on VPCs in various languages and research domains.)
*Bibliografia essenziale / Essential bibliography[http://verbisintagmatici.caissa.it/Bibliography.html]*.
Edited by Francesca Masini.
Lists 70 publications on verb-particle constructions in Italian and other Romance languages, as
well as some useful references on the linguistic typology of motion events. Updated until 2010.
Booij, Geert, and Jaap van Marle, eds. 2003. Yearbook of Morphology 2003.
Dordrecht/Boston/London: Kluwer.
Volume dedicated to complex predicates with preverbs, a phenomenon which has considerable
overlap with VPCs. Treats their mixed morphological and syntactic status for some Germanic,
Romance, Uralic and Australian languages. Includes some papers on diachronic change and one
paper discussing morpheme detection by learners.
Dehé, Nicole. 2015. “Particle verbs in Germanic.” In Word Formation: An International Handbook of
the Languages of Europe, vol. 1. (Handbücher zur Sprach- und Kommunikationswissenschaft /
Handbooks of Linguistics and Communication Science (HSK) series.) Edited by Peter O. Müller,
Ingeborg Ohnheiser, Susan Olsen, and Franz Rainer, 611–626. Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton.
Succinct survey and comparison of VPCs in English, the North Germanic languages, German,
Dutch, Afrikaans, and even Yiddish. Lists some of their central morpho-syntactic properties and
provides a rapid overview of the different approaches to these constructions in the generative
literature.
Dehé, Nicole, Ray Jackendoff, Andrew McIntyre, and Silke Urban, eds. 2002. Verb-Particle
Explorations. Berlin: De Gruyter.
Brings together analyses of syntactic, morphological and semantic properties as well as
processing aspects of VPCs in some Germanic languages, from a variety of theoretical
frameworks.
Iacobini, Claudio. 2015. “Particle verbs in Romance.” In Word Formation: An International Handbook
of the Languages of Europe, vol. 1. (Handbücher zur Sprach- und Kommunikationswissenschaft /
Handbooks of Linguistics and Communication Science (HSK) series.) Edited by Peter O. Müller,
Ingeborg Ohnheiser, Susan Olsen, and Franz Rainer, 626–658. Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton.
Overview of morpho-syntactic, semantic and aspectual features of VPCs in the Romance
languages. Includes a section on the origins of Romance VPCs and offers an implicational scale of

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semantic concepts that can be expressed by them. Discusses the contemporary uneven
distribution of VPCs across Romance languages.
Toivonen, Ida. 2020. “Verbal particles, results, and directed motion.” In The Cambridge Handbook of
Germanic Linguistics. Edited by Michael T. Putnam, and B. Richard Page, 516–536. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
Deals with the syntax of VPCs, including the debate discussed in the section *Theoretical
Linguistics and the Verb-Particle Paradox*, as well as with how VPCs, cross-Germanically, relate
to and interact with other constructions, such as the resultative construction, as in She painted the
door black, and the directed motion construction, as in He elbowed her way towards the exit.
*Verb Particle Constructions: A Bibliography[http://ling.uni-
konstanz.de/pages/home/dehe/bibl/PV.html]*. Edited by Nicole Dehé.
Online bibliography created in the early 2000s and updated until 2015, containing over 200
publications. Mainly focuses on syntax and morphology of particle verbs in Germanic languages,
but takes a wider angle as well.
VPCs in Germanic Languages
VPCs are very common in the Germanic languages and share some properties across these
languages, though there are also interesting differences across (groups of) Germanic languages.
Some scholars interested in verb-particle constructions have therefore expanded their scope from,
say, *VPCs in English* only or *VPCs in German* only, to VPCs in mainly two Germanic languages,
as do Los et al. 2012, to VPCs in several Germanic languages, as in Ramchand and Svenonius 2002,
or even to VPCs in practically all the Germanic languages. Examples of this latter broad view, already
mentioned in the *General Overviews* section, are Dehé 2015 and Toivonen 2020. Larsen 2014
focuses on English but covers other Germanic languages as well.
Dehé, Nicole. 2015. “Particle verbs in Germanic.” In Word Formation: An International Handbook of
the Languages of Europe, vol. 1. (Handbücher zur Sprach- und Kommunikationswissenschaft /
Handbooks of Linguistics and Communication Science (HSK) series.) Edited by Peter O. Müller,
Ingeborg Ohnheiser, Susan Olsen, and Franz Rainer, 611–626. Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton.
A chapter that gives the reader a quick overview of VPCs in a wide range of Germanic languages.
VPCs’ morpho-syntactic properties are compared across groups of languages, namely (i) German,
Yiddish, Dutch and Afrikaans, (ii) English, Norwegian, Icelandic and Faroese, and (iii) Danish and
Swedish, based on the positional possibilities of the particle with respect to the verb. The reader
also gets an overview of the major formal (i.e., generative-linguistic) approaches to particle verbs.
Larsen, Darrell. 2014. “*Particles and Particle-Verb Constructions in English and Other Germanic
Languages[http://udspace.udel.edu/handle/19716/13395]*.”Ph.D. diss., University of Delaware.
Apart from making its own contribution to the analysis of VPCs, including in complex constructions
such as They’re trying to make John out a liar, this dissertation has an impressive near-one-
hundred-page overview of previous accounts of VPCs. Cites some examples from Norwegian,
Danish and Swedish.
Los, Bettelou, Corrien Blom, Geert Booij, Marion Elenbaas, and Ans van Kemenade. 2012.
Morphosyntactic Change: A Comparative Study of Particles and Prefixes. (Cambridge Studies in
Linguistics series, 134.) Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
A book centrally concerned with *Theoretical Linguistics and the Verb-Particle Paradox*. There are
individual chapters on the synchrony and on the diachrony of VPCs in Dutch and in English. The
final chapter deals with early prefixes in Germanic (including Gothic) and the rise of newer prefixes
in West Germanic.
Ramchand, Gillian, and Peter Svenonius. 2002. *“The lexical syntax and lexical semantics of the verb-
particle
construction[https://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/document?repid=rep1&type=pdf&doi=26160e796a58259191
c31c06978a0d2493865829]*.” In Proceedings of the 21st West Coast Conference on Formal
Linguistics (WWCFL 21). Edited by Line Mikkelsen, and Christopher Potts, 387–400. Somerville, MA:
Cascadilla Press.
Proposes, within a particular theoretical framework in Generative Syntax, a semantic
decomposition and an associated syntactic analysis of VPCs in terms of three ‘subevents’

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(causing, process and result). The authors produce some evidence against previous analyses and
for their own proposal from English, Icelandic, Swedish and Norwegian, but also from Scottish
Gaelic, which has movable particles, as in (many) Germanic languages.
Toivonen, Ida. 2020. “Verbal particles, results, and directed motion.” In The Cambridge Handbook of
Germanic Linguistics. Edited by Michael T. Putnam, and B. Richard Page, 516–536. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
Gives a succinct overview of some of the main points of debate surrounding VPCs in Germanic,
such as the one discussed here under *Theoretical Linguistics and the Verb-Particle Paradox*, but
also the particles’ part-of-speech membership (on which, see also *Descriptive Linguistics: Oft-
Treated Grammar Issues*).
VPCs in English
English VPCs – commonly referred to as phrasal verbs – have been focused on in works concerned
with English language learning and didactics (see *Beyond the Core Fields*). In linguistic theory, the
variable word order of English VPCs was noted early on, for instance in Chomsky 1957, which led to
English VPCs featuring prominently in works on syntax, morphology and the language architecture
generally (see *Theoretical Linguistics and the Verb-Particle Paradox*). Bolinger 1971 is theory-
neutral, though, and Cappelle 2005 is also light in theoretical assumptions. Both works are broad in
scope and put description first. They explore, for instance, which elements can swarm around a
particle (as in The Simpsons hurry [right on in towards the couch], where in is arguably the head of a
single phrase) and which larger syntactic constructions (such as ditransitives) include a particle (or
particle phrase) (as in Can I write you out a cheque?). Elenbaas 2007 also contains a wealth of
descriptive data, while also discussing and adopting more theory-laden proposals. Luo 2019 and
Goldberg 2016 take a cognitive-linguistic and constructionist approach, respectively.
Bolinger, Dwight. 1971.The Phrasal Verb in English. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
A classic reference on the English VPC, written with flair and a keen understanding of what a
remarkable and multifaceted phenomenon the VPC really is. No corpus is consulted, just razor-
sharp introspection on a range of phenomena, including the prosodic realization of VPCs in
sentences, their word order, the possibility of particles to take on aspectual functions, argument
realization alternations such as I wiped out the dirt and I wiped out the sink, and much else
besides.
Cappelle, Bert. 2005. “*Particle Patterns in English: A Comprehensive
Coverage[https://kulak.kuleuven.be/nl/onderzoek/Onderzoeksdomeinen/language-literature-
translation/letteren/onderzoektaalkunde/fest/descriptiveenglishgrammar/bert-cappelle/bert-cappelle-
proefschrift.pdf]*.” Ph.D. diss., KU Leuven.
Reads like a detailed, traditional, descriptive grammar of English VPCs, covering their phrase
structure (the constituents appearing alongside the verb and particle), information structure (the
placement of ‘old’ vs. ‘new’ constituents, and ‘light’ vs. ‘heavy’ ones, co-responsible for word-order
alternations), argument structure (various alternations, including the one in the description of
Bolinger 1971), and event structure (the aspectual impact of particles). Couched in “Pattern
Grammar”, a kind of Construction Grammar.
Chomsky, Noam. 1957. Syntactic
Structures[https://archive.org/details/NoamChomskySyntcaticStructures]. (Janua Linguarum, Series
Minor, 4.) The Hague: Mouton.
This programmatic text is merely historically interesting, insofar as it refers to the VPC as a
“subconstruction of V”. It proposes a separation transformation to optionally reorder a string such
as The police brought in the criminal as The police brought the criminal in. Chomsky adds a similar,
but obligatory transformation, operating on strings that have a pronoun as NP object, such that
*The police brought in him is ‘rewritten’ as The police brought him in.
Elenbaas, Marion. 2007. *“The Synchronic and Diachronic Syntax of the English Verb-Particle
Combination[https://www.lotpublications.nl/Documents/149_fulltext.pdf]*.” Ph.D. diss., Radboud
University Nijmegen (LOT Dissertations 149).
Thorough overview of the main generative-linguistic analyses of the morphology and syntax of
English VPCs, as well as their origins in Old English and their further development into Middle

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English. Readers new to the topic will appreciate the first chapter for its concise survey of
morphological, semantic and argument-structural properties of present-day VPCs.
Goldberg, Adele E. 2016. “Tuning in to the Verb-Particle Construction in English.” In Approaches to
Complex Predicates. Edited by Léa Nash and Pollet Samvelian, 110–141. Leiden: Brill.
Unlike Chomsky 1957, for instance, where the verb and particle make up one word (and jointly
combine with an NP following it), this paper suggests that the transitive VPC has a tripartite
structure, with both NP and Prt sisters to the verb and the ordering V-NP-Prt as basic, by virtue of
the VPC’s relatedness to the caused-motion construction (e.g. put the book on the table). The
paper stresses the need to acknowledge both schematic templates and highly specific, lexicalized
combinations.
Luo, Han. 2019. Particle Verbs in English: A Cognitive Linguistic Perspective. Singapore: Springer.
Like most works concerned with the English VPC, this short monograph (the author’s published
PhD thesis) addresses, among other issues, the well-known particle placement alternation,
accounted for here in terms of differences in construal (holistic for pick up the pen, sequential for
pick the pen up), a proposal that Luo claims also works for idiomatic combinations (e.g. lay down
the law vs. let one’s hair down or V one’s heart out vs. V up a storm).
VPCs in German
Especially at the turn of the twenty-first century, there was a flurry of publications on German VPCs,
which grappled with their paradoxical nature (see also *Theoretical Linguistics and the Verb-Particle
Paradox*): they often look like single words (anrufen ‘call’) but they can also appear as though they’re
made up of multiple independent words (Ruf deine Mutti an ‘Call your mom’). As Müller 2002 (p. vii)
puts it, “[w]hether particle verb combinations are morphological objects or whether they are the result
of a syntactic process has been discussed for several decades and it seems as if the issue has taken
on religious proportions.” Most of the works on German VPCs listed here are equally staunch in their
defense of a particular position but break away from dogmatism by carefully examining the
construction’s properties. As it happens, Wurmbrand 1998, Lüdeling 2001, and Müller 2002 all take
the view that the particle in German VPCs are complements to the verb, suggesting that these units
are phrases, not words. Zeller 2001, too, treats the particle as a complement, but argues that it
sometimes heads a full phrase and sometimes does not – in the latter case, the particle-cum-verb unit
will behave like a single morphological object. Research on German VPCs has focused quite a bit on
the possibility of particle fronting (also called particle ‘topicalization’), a topic that is also addressed in
the works mentioned above. Peculiar to German is the use of more than one particle, as in
hin+auf+steigen (‘climb up’), a topic treated in McIntyre 2001. Steering clear of thorny syntactic issues
is Dewell 2011, a work on the meanings of different particles from a Cognitive Linguistics perspective.
Dewell, Robert B. 2011. The Meaning of Particle / Prefix Constructions in German. Amsterdam: John
Benjamins.
Packed with examples, this book provides a cognitive-linguistic treatment of German VPCs, for
instance mein Verband am Finger war durchgeblutet (‘the bandage on my finger was all bloody
[had bled through]’), which calls for a ‘sequential’ perspectival mode, in contrast with inseparable
complex verbs, as in Raucherhaut ist meist schlecht durchblutet (‘The skin of smokers is usually ill
supplied with blood’), which evokes a ‘synoptic’ perspectival mode. Interesting read for more
functionally-oriented linguists.
Lüdeling, Anke. 2001. On Particle Verbs and Similar Constructions in German. (Dissertations in
Linguistics.) Stanford, CA: CSLI Publications.
In her lightly revised Ph.D. dissertation, Lüdeling discusses various linguistic tests that have been
used to identify German VPCs and argues that these constructions cannot be easily distinguished
from other types, such as resultatives. One thing that sets them apart is their ‘listedness’, or lack of
transparency. This semantic factor, rather than structural factors, accounts for much of the
behavior of VPCs: when semantically dependent on the verb, the particle can’t be ‘topicalized’
(i.e., fronted), for instance.
McIntyre, Andrew. 2001. German Double Particles as Preverbs. Morphology and Conceptual
Semantics. (Studien zur deutschen Grammatik 61.) Tübingen: Stauffenburg.
Revised Ph.D. dissertation on ‘double particle verbs’ like hinübergehen (‘walk over’; ‘die’) and
(he)rausfinden (‘find out’), and pleonastic structures like etwas ins Glas hineingießen (‘pour