Chapter 8. Danish verb prefixes and the schematizing transitive prefix construction

Abstract

In a constructionist approach to grammar, morphological constructions and clausal constructions may have the same theoretical status as argument structure constructions (e.g., Goldberg, 1995, pp. 22–23; Croft, 2001; Booij, 2010). In this chapter, the author argues that the Danish verb prefixes be- and for-, in addition to verbal derivation, impose a lexeme-independent transitive argument structure construction with three meaning variants. In a large-scale corpus study, a distributional analysis of the prefix construction and its association with verbal base lexemes shows that the two constructional variants have a different semantic profile. While the potential productivity of be- and for- constructions is restricted, authentic examples of creative usage show that all constructional variants are partially productive in present-day Danish.