A nanosyntactic approach to Dutch deadjectival verbs

There are three ways of deriving verbs in Dutch: through zero marking, through suffix-ation, and through prefixation. We focus on prefixed deadjectival verbs, contrasting two views. According to the first view, prefixed verbs are left-headed: the prefix is responsible for the change in category, i.e. [V ver [A breed]]. The second view holds that prefixed verbs are right-headed, and involve a zero verbalizing suffix, i.e., [V ver [V [A breed] ∅]]. We argue in this paper for a mixed, nanosyntactic, approach. We adopt Ramchand’s (2008) decomposition of the verb and argue that the prefix spells out part of the verbal structure and the verbal root spells out another part.