Pre/post-asymmetries in Dutch verbalizers

Abstract In this paper we provide a Nanosyntactic account of two verbalizing affixes in Dutch: the prefix ver - and the suffix - el . We show that they behave differently in their interaction with past tense and in their effect on argument structure. We derive these differences by assigning the two affixes a different lexical representation – a so-called L-tree – which in turn means that they are inserted into the syntactic derivation in very different ways. The analysis intends to be a first step towards a more general formalization of the systematic asymmetries between pre- and post-elements.