Towards an explanation of the syntax of West Germanic particle verbs: A cognitive-pragmatic view

While the unusual behaviour of particle verbs in West Germanic has been the subject of much debate, it still awaits a substantive explanation. These verbs undergo reversal and/or intercalation subject to such syntactic constraints as finiteness and clause type. Situated within Prototype Theory, this study defines the relevant grammatical categories in terms of varying degrees of syntacticity (i.e., sentence-likeness vs. word-likeness) of which cohesiveness is a major indicator. The higher the cohesiveness of a given category, the more resistant it is to syntactic processes. The following scale of increasing cohesiveness is proposed: main clauses, finite verbs, subordinate clauses, non-finite verbs, nouns. Thus, reversal and intercalation are found in the leftward, though not in the rightward categories. This scale is pragmatically motivated. Generally speaking, main clauses are communicatively more important than subordinate clauses. Therefore, the former require a wider choice of expressive means such as reversal and intercalation than the latter. The availability of syntactic options is argued to be an iconic reflection of communicative needs.