This paper seeks to shed some light on a few semantic and syntactic issues concerning aspectual post-verbal particles. Besides having directional meanings or forming idiomatic combinations, the particles associated with verbs in the structures known as particle verbs, phrasal verbs, or verb-particle constructions, can also convey aspectual meanings, namely, continuative aspect, a new subcategory of imperfective aspect proposed by Brinton (2009), and telicity, a notion pertaining to accomplishments, one of the kinds of situations proposed by Vendler (1957). Continuative aspect portrays a situation as continuing in time instead of ending; the post-verbal particles which can add continuativity to the situation they are inserted in are on, along, and away. Telicity is a feature that situations have if they have a definite, intrinsic endpoint; the particles which can add a telos to situations are up, down, out, off, through, over, and away. These aspectual notions might be accompanied by some other related meaning, which arises upon the combination of verb and particle. On the telic group, up is the particle which has the purest telic meaning; its correspondent in the continuative group is on. In addition, if we apply the notion of productivity in the sense of Jackendoff (2002) to them, we can conclude that telic up and continuative on and away are productive, in that their combination with verbs can be built online, and the outputs need not be listed in the lexicon. The remaining particles in both groups are, in turn, semiproductive; this means that, even though there is some regularity in their combination with verbs, those cannot be built online and need to be individually listed in the lexicon. These structures also pose a challenge to syntax; not only aspectual, but all particle verbs have syntactic characteristics, such as particle shift, which are difficult to explain in syntactic theory. The two most commonly adopted attempts are the complex head and the small clause analyses, but neither of them is sufficient to explain all the peculiarities in the syntactic behavior of verb-particle constructions. Jackendoff (2002) proposes that, if binary branching were dropped, it would be possible to propose a theory in which the relations that the particle has with the verb and with the DP complement did not have precedence over one another, which seems to be the main reason behind the difficulty in describing the syntactic structure of particle verbs. Furthermore, a few particularities in the syntactic influence of some aspectual particles on the verbs raise even more questions on the syntax of verb-particle constructions.
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