The Morphology of German Particle Verbs: Solving the Bracketing Paradox

Inflectional affixes are sensitive to morphological properties of the elements they attach to. Therefore Bierwisch (1987) suggested that the inflectional material is combined with both the verbal stem of simplex verbs and the verbal stem of particle verbs. He argued that this leads to the bracketing paradox in the case of particle verbs since the semantic contribution of the inflectional information scopes over the semantic contribution of the complete particle verb. This paradox will be discussed in section 2.1. In section 2.2, I will discuss nominalizations and adjective derivation, which are also problematic because of various bracketing paradoxes. In section 3 I will suggest a solution to these apparent paradoxes that assumes that inflectional and derivational prefixes and suffixes always attach to a form of a stem that contains the information about a possible particle 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 for the analysis of particle verbs mechanisms are necessary.