How difficult are complex verbs? Evidence from German, Dutch and English

Abstract

Most research on the acquisition of verbs has focused on acquiring the syntactic category verb and on the verb's argument structure. It is assumed that due to their specific syntactic nature verbs are acquired in a different fashion than nouns, and that due to their specific semantic nature verbs do not simply denote activities or situations, but rather package meaning components in a (language-) specific way. This paper refines the problem of acquiring verbs by paying attention to differences in the internal constituency of the verb lexicon in three closely related West Germanic languages - German, Dutch, and English. It is argued that the verb lexicon is not a uniform class but consists of various semantically or morphologically defined subsets, most notably simplex verbs like cover and complex verbs like uncover or cover up. It is shown that while complex verbs do not form an acquisition problem per se, not all (groups of) verbs are acquired in the same fashion and with the same ease. In particular, differences in the acquisition of particle and prefix verbs are discussed as well as differences in the lexical diversity of the verbal subsets in the three languages under investigation