Focusing primarily on Swedish, a Germanic language whose particles have
not previously been studied extensively, Non-Projecting Words: A Case
Study on Swedish Particles develops a theory of non-projecting words
in which particles are morphologically independent words that do not
project phrases.
Particles have long constituted a puzzle for Germanic syntax, as they
exhibit properties of both morphological and syntactic constructs.
Although non-projecting words have appeared in the literature before, it
has gone largely unnoticed that such structures violate the basic tenets
of X-bar theory. This work identifies these violations and develops a
formally explicit revision of X-bar theory that can accommodate the
requisite "weak" projections.
The resulting theory, stated in terms of Lexical-Functional Grammar,
also yields a novel classification of clitics, and it sheds new light on
a range of recent theoretical proposals, including economy, multi-word
constructions, and the primitives of lexical semantics. At an abstract
level, we see that the modular, parallel-projection architecture of LFG
is essential to the description of a variety of otherwise recalcitrant
facts about non-projecting words.