Preverbs: an introduction

The notion ‘preverb’ is a traditional descriptive notion in Indo-European linguistics. It refers to morphemes that appear in front of a verb, and which form a close semantic unit with that verb. In many cases, the morpheme that functions as a preverb can also function without a preverbal context, often as an adverb or an adposition. Most linguists use the notion ‘preverb’ as a cover term for preverbal words and preverbal prefixes. The preverb may be separated from the verb whilst retaining its close cohesion with the verb, which is called ‘tmesis’. It may also develop into a bound morpheme, that is, a prefix inseparable from the verb, with concomitant reduction of phonological form in some cases. If the preverb has become a real prefix, we may use the more specific notion of ‘complex verb’, whereas we take the notion ‘complex predicate’ to refer generally to multi-morphemic expressions with verbal valency. That is, we make a terminological distinction between complex predicates and complex verbs. The latter are multi-morphemic, but behave as single grammatical words. For both complex predicates in general (cf. Spencer 1991, Ackerman and Webelhuth 1998) and complex verbs (cf. Miller 1993) in particular, the question has been raised how and where in the grammar they should be accounted for. Well-known examples of complex predicates are auxiliary-verb sequences, serial verb constructions, the coverb-verb combinations as in Australian languages (Schultze-Berndt, this volume), similar light verb constructions in other languages, and verb raising constructions in Germanic languages. These different types of complex predicates represent various kinds of mismatches in the syntactic and morphological coding of complex events and verbal valency, and thereby challenge our view of the architecture of the grammar, and the relation between syntax, morphology, and the lexicon. Complex predicates of the preverb-verb type occur in most European languages, both the Indo-European languages (Watkins 1963, 1964) and those of the Finno-Ugric family (Ackerman and Webelhuth 1998, Ackerman (this volume), and in Georgian and Caucasian languages (Harris, this volume). A number of mostly descriptive articles on preverbs in the languages of Europe can be found in Rousseau (ed., 1995). In particular, particle verbs in Germanic languages have received a lot of attention in the recent literature (Ackerman and Webelhuth 1998, Lüdeling 2001, McIntyre 2000, 2001, 2002, this volume), Booij 2002a;b, Dehé and Wanner (eds.) 2001, Dehé et al. (eds.) 2002, Zeller 2001; this volume, van Kemenade and Los, this volume, and references in these publications). The history of particles and prefixes in Latin and French is discussed in Vincent (1999), and Dufresne et al. (this volume) respectively. It is the aim of the collection of articles in this thematic section of the Yearbook of Morphology on preverbs to provide in-depth empirical investigations of preverbs in a number of typologically diverse languages and to discuss