Moved preverbs in German: Displaced or misplaced?

Abstract

A crucial question that arises in the study of preverb-verb constructions across languages concerns the way the preverb is combined with the verb. One can pose this question from a semantic point of view: Are the preverb and the verb semantically independent or is the preverb-verb construction lexicalized? If the meaning of the preverb can be defined in isolation, how is it combined with the meaning of the verb — is the preverb a semantic argument of the verb, or an aspectual operator etc.? Another line of investigation would be to focus on the structural side of the construction, for example by asking if the combination of preverb and verb is formed in morphology or if it has the status of a phrasal syntactic construction.