Preverbs and particles in Old French

Abstract

Preverbs are intriguing grammatical objects. Semantically, they form a lexical unit with the verb they modify, sometimes behaving like an affix and sometimes more like an independent word. In all cases, however, preverbs appear to form a complex predicate with the verb they modify. While the formation of such complex predicates in Germanic languages has always received a lot of attention, very few studies have been devoted to the description of complex predicates in Romance languages. This is partly due to the fact that most modern Romance languages appear to lack verb-particle constructions, using derivation (prefixation) as a means of modifying the semantic and morphosyntactic properties of the stem verb. Consequently, with the notable exceptions of Roeper and Keyser (1992) and of Di Sciullo (1996, 1999), very few researchers have tried to provide a unified analysis of particles and prefixes within a broader theory of complex predicates.