Syntactic Transfer Patterns of German Particle Verbs and their Impact on Lexical Semantics

German particle verbs, like anblicken (to gaze at) combine a base verb (blicken) with a particle (an) to form a special kind of Multi Word Expression. Particle verbs may share the semantics of the base verb and the particle to a variable degree. However, while syntactic subcategorization frames tend to be good predictor for the semantics of verbs in general (verbs that are similar in meaning also tend to have similar subcategorization frames and selectional preferences), there are regular changes in subcategorization frames by particle verbs with regard to the corresponding base verbs. This paper demonstrates that the syntactic behavior of particle verbs and base verbs together (modeling regular changes in subcategorization frames by particle verbs and corresponding base verbs) and applying clustering techniques allows us to distinguish particle verb meaning and shows the tight connection between transfer patterns and the semantic classes of particle verbs.