1 Verb prefixation of the Slavic type in terms of concord and relativization Boban Arsenijević, Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona 1. Introduction The empirical base of this paper is the system of verb prefixes in Slavic languages, with a focus on Serbo-Croatian (S-C). The paper especially targets the asymmetries between the so-called external and internal (or superlexical and lexical) prefixes, but it eventually proposes a general analysis for the verbal prefixation in S-C. Analyses offered in the literature so far form two groups: 1) one in which the two classes of prefixes are generated in two distinct functional projections, and where the asymmetries among the two classes of prefixes are derived from this structural and categorial difference (e.g. Svenonius 2004, Di Sciullo & Slabakova 2005) and 2) a group of accounts in which all prefixes are generated in the same functional (or lexical) projection, and their interpretive and (morpho-)syntactic differences stem from the syntactic context in which they appear, especially from the type of complement they take (e.g. Arsenijević 2007a, Žaucer 2009, 2010a). I present a novel analysis with a broader empirical coverage and fewer theoretical assumptions, in particular with a lower number of functional projections involved. The analysis employs an existing mechanism: that of relativization, fed with functional categories from the verbal domain. At the theoretical side, the paper makes three fundamental contributions. One relates to the notion of relativization. It has been argued that a number of constituents next to the traditional relative clauses of the nominal domain should also be analyzed as relative clauses. Such arguments have been put forth in respect of temporal and spatial modification clauses (Geis 1970, 1975, Larson 1987, Demirdache and Uribe Etchebarria 2004, Dubinsky and Williams 1995), conditional clauses (Geis 1985, Lycan 2001, Bhatt and Pancheva 2006, Arsenijević 2009a, Tomaszewicz 2009, Haegeman 2010b), complement clauses (Arsenijević 2009b, Manzini and Savoia 2003 and their subsequent work, Polinsky and Caponigro 2008, Haegeman and Urögdi 2010a,b, 1994 and Aboh 2005, Krapova 2010) and DPs (among others, Campbel 1996, Koopman 2003, 2005). While temporal and conditional clauses are relative clauses of the CP domain, and complement clauses appear in domains of different categories, this paper is the first, to the best of my knowledge, to introduce relativization to the domain of the verb (i.e. VP, or AspP). The second theoretical contribution takes Kayne’s (2009) argument that lexical nouns do not take complements one step further, establishing a view in which none of the cross-linguistically core content words: nouns and verbs can have a complement. This is done by offering an analysis in which the lexical verb bottoms its entire syntactic domain (and projects the entire vP). The third contribution is in formulating a hypothesis that relativization is the process that facilitates all the instances of type recursion in grammar. This hypothesis is obviously confirmed by regular relative clauses, and also finds support in the works cited above in respect of categorial domains of relativization for other type-recursive configurations such as complement clauses, conditional clauses, temporal and spatial modification clauses. It is also backed by the works such as de Vries (2002: 305-346) for possessives and the likes. This paper advances a view in which even domains of type recursion which at the first sight do not resemble relativization – such as verb prefixation – plausibly involve exactly the same strategy. In Section 2, I present major syntactic and semantic asymmetries between the so-called internal and external prefixes, and a class of analyses that has been taken as standard: the one using two distinct syntactic positions for the two classes of prefixes. Section 3 points at some serious problems for such an analysis, and presents an alternative class of analyses, in which both types of prefixes are generated in the projection of the predicate of result, the difference being that internal prefixes take nominal complements, while external prefixes take complements headed by a verb; the section ends with a discussion of some advantages, but also of some problems for this class of accounts. Section 4 presents a novel analysis in terms of concord and relativization, in which prefixes are markers of agreement