The Old English distribution and subsequent loss of preverbal ge- 13th Diachronic Generative Syntax Conference University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, June 4th, 2011 Thomas McFadden Universitetet i Tromsø thomas.mcfadden@uit.no 1 Introduction OE had a prefix ge-, cognate with German ge-, Dutch ge-, Gothic ga-, which could be found on most lexical categories: Cat Example Gloss V gebiddan ‘pray’ N gebr¯ oþor ‘brethren’ A ger ¯ æde ‘ready’ Adv gehw ¯ ær ‘everywhere’ ge- was especially common in the verbal system, but its function here has proven rather difficult to characterize. • It was particularly common in past-participial forms, yet was never obligatory with them and was also regularly found on other forms. • It doesn’t seem to be either clearly inflectional or clearly derivational. • It has apparent effects on a range of grammatical properties of the verbs it attaches to, including aspect and aktionsart, argument structure and (lexical) semantics. The traditional historical work that was done on ge- never satisfactorily resolved its status, and it hasn’t gotten much attention recently. The time is right to come back to it, and today I’m going to make a start. It’s a big project, and my goals are modest. • Lay out the fundamental issues involved and the puzzles presented by OE ge-. • Discuss previous approaches, both the traditional ones, and more recent work on related patterns in other languages. • Consider methodological issues in approaching a project like this with a corpus study. • Present the results of a preliminary study and discuss what they suggest for an eventual analysis. 1