Anne Schröder

On the Productivity of Verbal Prefixation in English Anne Schröder

One of the most far-reaching changes that has been observed for the English language was its progressive transformation from a highly inflectional, synthetic language, Old English, to a more analytic one, Present-day English, with all the consequences that this has had for many syntactic constructions. As a case in point, the postposition of the particle in particle verbs, as in the analytic construction to go out, has been interpreted as the result of a change in word order from SOV to SVO, which, in turn, is believed to have triggered a decline of the synthetic verbal prefix system, i.e. of verbs such as the now obsolete to outgo.