The phrase structure of non-projecting words

Linguists often encounter elements that are neither bound morphemes, nor full phrasal constituents. These elements are problematic for three reasons: rst, they are di cult to categorize structurally; second, they do not form a uniform class; and third, they do not do not t neatly into most theories of phrase structure. This dissertation focusses on Swedish verbal particles, which form a particular group of such elements. Swedish particles are exempli ed by upp `up' and bort `away'. I argue that the verbal particles in Swedish are syntactically independent words which do not project phrases. Particles then di er syntactically from other constituents and are therefore governed by di erent distributional constraints. Speci cally, I argue, particles must adjoin to V. This explains the otherwise mysterious word order facts: verbal particles immediately follow the verbal position within the VP. The analysis advocated in this work also explains the fact that particles cannot take complements and modi ers. Since particles do not project phrasal levels, there is nowhere for other phrases to attach. Particles are distinguished from other words solely by their phrase structure realization. In other respects, they may be semantically and functionally identical to fully projecting words. Phrase structure must thus be independent of other syntactic information and also of semantic information, as is generally assumed in the formal framework of Lexical-Functional Grammar (lfg). In lfg, the level of constituency and word order (constituent structure) is separated from other levels of linguistic representation, such as functional structure, argument structure, semantic structure, etc. Importantly, predicate-argument relations are not directly tied to the c-structural representation of a clause, and this is crucial for the analysis of Swedish particles, since particles can