Het voorzetselvoorwerp

This article extends the classification of verbs that was provided in Broekhuis (1997), which is based on the number and types of nominal arguments of the verb, to verbs that take a PP-complement. It turns out that those verb types that have at most one internal nominal argument (that is, the intransitive, transitive and unaccusative verbs) have counterparts with an additional PP-complement. Verbs with two internal nominal arguments (that is, the ditransitive and so-called NOM-DAT verbs) cannot take an additional PP-complement, which follows from the hypothesis that verbs can have two internal arguments at the most. Another set of verbs with PP-complements do not involve the addition of a PP-complement to the nominal arguments of the verb, but substitution of a PP-complement for a direct object, which may give rise to verb frames containing a dative NP and a PP-complement.