Adpositions can sometimes be used without a complement, in which case they are often referred to as intransitive adpositions or (verbal) particles. However, this subsection will show that intransitive adpositions and particles do not form a homogeneous group. Consider example (75).

Example (75) shows that the particle op can be used in the same function as the predicative PP op zijn hoofd; substituting one for the other does not affect the core meaning of the example, which expresses that the hat is undergoing a change of location. It seems plausible that the fact that op can be used as an intransitive adposition is due to the fact that the information conveyed by the complement of the preposition op is more or less superfluous; our knowledge of the world enables us to reconstruct the full event and to determine the new location of the moved entity, even if the complement is not overtly expressed. Regardless of how one wants to account for this intuition, it is clear that there is a close relationship between the use of op as a preposition and its use as an intransitive adposition. In this respect, the intransitive use of op is similar to the pseudo-intransitive use of transitive verbs like etento eat; if there is no direct object, it is inferred that a canonical object (an edible entity) is involved. Intransitive adpositions are generally locational in nature, and are mainly used with verbs denoting activities related to dressing and personal hygiene, as in (76a&b), or used to refer to pragmatically determinable locations, as in (76c). See Section 32.3.1.5, sub I, for further discussion.

The adposition af in (77a) seems to serve a similar function as the PP op zijn hoofd in (75). The main difference is that whereas the intransitive use of op in (75) has implications concerning the new location of the hat, af in (77a) identifies the original location of the hat. However, it is less clear whether af can actually be considered an intransitive adposition. If so, it must have the lexical property that it can only be used as such, since it cannot take the noun phrase zijn hoofd as its complement. Alternatively, one could of course speculate that the particle af is somehow related to its use in the directional circumposition van ... af; cf. (77b).

Often, there is no obvious semantic relationship between the use of intransitive adpositions and their prepositional counterparts. In such cases, we will use the term (verbal) particle. These particles usually form more or less fixed semantic units with their associated main verbs and cannot be replaced by a full PP without affecting the core meaning of the construction. Despite the fact that Dutch orthography requires the particle and the verb to be written as a single word when they are adjacent, the combination probably cannot be considered a morphological compound, given the fact that the finite form of the verb can be placed in the second position of main clauses, while the particle is stranded in clause-final position. Illustrations of this splitting process are given in the primed examples in (78).

The examples above suggest that there is a gradient scale by which intransitive adpositions are semantically related to their prepositional counterparts. In some cases the relationship is quite close, while in other cases it is looser or perhaps even nonexistent. As a result, the distinction between intransitive adpositions of the type in (75) and the verbal particles in (78) may not always be clear-cut, but we will make it anyway. In classifying an adposition, we will rely heavily on whether it has retained its original spatial meaning and can appear in the same environment as a predicative PP, or whether it has (partially) lost its meaning and cannot be replaced by a predicative PP (without affecting the core meaning of the construction). Subsection III will discuss a number of syntactic differences between intransitive adpositions and verbal particles, but first we need to discuss the particle verbs in more detail.

Dutch has many particle verbs, i.e. more or less fixed combinations of verbs and particles. The meanings of particle verbs are generally not compositionally determined; they are to some extent unpredictable and therefore need to be listed in the lexicon. This is especially clear from the fact that there are several particle verbs that seem to be derived not from a verb, but from an adjective or a noun. Table (79) provides some of such cases.

That the meaning of the particle verbs in (79) must be listed in the lexicon suggests that we are dealing with complex words. Subsection IV will show, however, that particle verbs cannot be considered complex words in the usual, morphological sense of the term. For this reason, we will often choose not to stick to the orthographic rule of writing the particle and the verb as a single word under adjacency. Note that the fact that particle verbs are not regular compounds is also recognized by the more traditional grammars of Dutch; they use the term scheidbaar samengesteld werkwoord “separable compound verb” for these verbs, in order to distinguish them from real compounds of the type P + V, which do not allow the “split” pattern. Subsection IVcontains a brief discussion of the differences between the particle verbs and these so-called onscheidbaar samengestelde werkwoorden “inseparable compound verbs”.

Table 9 provides a small sample of particle verbs that are derived from existing verbs; cf. De Haas & Trommelen (1993: §2.6) for many more examples. By and large, the verbal particles can be said to be a subset of the spatial prepositions. There are only three exceptions, which are marked with an asterisk in the table. First, the particle af has no prepositional counterpart at all in standard colloquial Dutch (but see the remark above Table 7 in Section 32.2.3). Second, the particle mee, which is homophonous with the stranded counterpart of the preposition met used in instrumental and comitative phrases (e.g. met een hamer/mijn broerwith a hammer/my brother), is clearly not spatial. Finally, the particle na is not used as a spatial but as a temporal preposition in the standard language; in some cases it can perhaps be seen as an abbreviation of the complex spatial particle achternaafter/behind, which can be used as a postposition, as in Hij liep de jongen achternaHe followed the boy. That the meanings of the particle verbs are not compositionally determined does not mean that the original spatial meanings of the particles are completely undetectable; many of the particles in Table 9 can still be recognized as (i.e. feel like) spatial adpositions. Consequently, some of the examples in the table are semantically close to the examples with intransitive adpositions discussed in Subsection I.

In addition to the particles in Table 9, which clearly have an adpositional counterpart, Dutch has many other (i.e. non-adpositional) elements that are traditionally considered to be adverbs, but are similar to particles in that they can occur in fixed combinations with certain verbs. Moreover, many of them resemble adpositional phrases in that they behave like complementives denoting a change of location or direction. A small sample of such particle verbs is given in (80); cf. De Haas & Trommelen (1993: §2.6.3.2) for more cases.

In addition to the simple cases in Table 9, De Haas & Trommelen (1993: §2.6.3.3) give a large set of complex particles. Since these complex forms behave exactly like the simple ones, we will not discuss them here, but limit ourselves to giving a list. The first subset consists of particles of the form achter/voor + P, which denote a location, a direction or a time. The particles in (81a) can sometimes also be used as prepositions, but this is not the case for the particles in (81b). Note that the particles achteraf and vooraf in (81b) differ from the other cases in that they are strictly temporal.

The second subset in (82) consists of particles denoting a state. The particles P + een in (82a) alternate with the construction P + elkaareach other; cf. Hij frommelde de papieren in elkaar/ineenHe crumpled the papers.

Although the meanings of verbal particles are sometimes quite different from those of predicatively used adpositional phrases, they share at least two syntactic properties with them. First, Section 32.1.2, sub IIB1, has shown that the addition of a predicative PP can turn a regular intransitive verb into an unaccusative verb. In general, the particles in Table 9 have the same effect. Consider the case of af studerento graduate. While studerento study in (83a) has all the characteristics of a regular intransitive verb, the particle verb afstuderento graduate in (83a') has the characteristics of an unaccusative verb: the (b)-examples show that while studeren takes the perfect auxiliary hebben, afstuderen takes zijn; the (c)-examples show that while the past/passive participle gestudeerd cannot be used as an attributive modifier of a noun corresponding to the subject of the clause, af gestudeerd can; finally, the (d)-examples show that while studeren allows impersonal passivization, afstuderen does not under the intended reading (although it seems marginally possible with a generic reading).

In (84) we give similar examples with wegaway, which is taken from the set of particles in (80): like predicative adpositional phrases, the particle changes the intransitive verb lopen into an unaccusative verb. This shows that verbal particles such as weg behave exactly like predicative PPs such as naar schoolto school; cf. Section V2.1.2, sub III.

Second, the addition of a predicative PP can license as its logical subject an argument that is not selected by the verb; cf. Section 32.1.2, sub IIB2. The examples in (85) show that the addition of a particle can have the same effect, and thus show that the particle is also predicative in nature, despite the fact that it is not always clear what property the particle denotes; cf. Section 32.3.1.5, sub II, for a more detailed discussion of the semantics of particles.

There are other elements which are sometimes regarded as verbal particles that have no adpositional counterpart, such as the element samentogether in (86a). However, it is questionable whether samen acts as a particle in the same sense as the elements discussed above, because it differs not only in meaning but also in syntactic behavior. In contrast to the particles in (83) and (84), the addition of samen does not change a regular intransitive verb like werkento work into an unaccusative one: the verb selects the perfect auxiliary hebben in (86b), the past/passive particle in (86c) cannot be used as an attributive modifier of a noun corresponding to the subject of the clause in (86a), and the impersonal passive construction in (86d) is perfectly acceptable.

The element samen also differs crucially from verbal particles in that it can be easily separated from the clause-final verbs: cf. dat zij samen aan dit project hebben gewerktthat they worked together on this project. It therefore seems safe to dismiss the claim that samen functions as a verbal particle in examples such as (86a).

The following subsections discuss several differences between intransitive adpositions and verbal particles.

Subsections II and III have shown that particle verbs share several of the properties of compounds. First, the meaning of a particle verb is not compositionally determined; it is usually impossible to fully predict the meaning of a particle verb on the basis of the meaning of its constituent parts, which is also a typical property of compounds. Second, table (79) has shown that there are particle verbs based on verb forms that are attested only in combination with a particular particle. This seems problematic for an analysis according to which the verb selects the particle in the same way as it would select other adpositional phrases, since selection usually involves classes of entities, not just a single word or phrase. Finally, examples (94) and (95) show that many particle verbs can be the input for morphological processes, which is common for (complex) words, but much less common for phrases. However, there are also several problems with the claim that particle verbs are complex words. We will examine this by comparing particle verbs with undisputed P + V compounds like overziento oversee and onderschattenunderestimate.