Joe:
#And Rosta wrote:
#> Dick:
#> #A lot of people think you get this in German. At least you do if you trust
#> #the standard orthography. E.g.
#> #Ich werde sie aufrufen. 'I will her up-call' = I'll ring her.
#> #Ich rufe sie auf. 'I call her up' = I ring her.  verb = rufe .... auf.
#>
#> Maybe I misunderstood what Joe had in mind. The orthography surely
#> correctly represents phonological words:
#>
#> Ich werde sie AUFrufen.
#> Ich RUfe sie AUF.
#>
#> but I don't know of any good syntactic arguments for this being a single
#> syntactic word. (Admittedly, I don't know German!) And the evidence
#> we do have very much points to _auf_ and _rufen_ being separate
#> words, syntactically.
#
#You mean that _rufen_ has _auf_ as part of its valence requirement.
#This would be similar to _se_ clitics in Romance; for example, Spanish:
#
#- Se       ahogo'.
#  CL-3pers drowned
#  'He drowned.'
#
#- No queria ahogarse.
#  No wanted drown-CL-3pers
#  'He didn't want to drown.'

Yes.

#It's hard to say if we're dealing with discontinuous compounds here
#(like phrasal verbs). Maybe. It's a pretty close call.

Okay, if you wanted to argue that there are discontinuous words then
maybe you could find examples; indeed the rigorless descriptive 
literature is full of examples of phrasal verbs et al (e.g. as well
as) being taken as single words, and many of these will involve
discontinuities. However, the mlore interesting question (for me) is
whether there's any evidence that obliges us to recognize
discontinuous syntactic words, and I think the answer is no and
indeed I can't imagine what it would look like even in principle.

For that matter, can even phonological words be discontinuous?
One thinks of "fanfuckintastic", but even here the whole thing is
a single phonological word, and a phrase within a word
is not possible: *"fan-well-i'll-be-damned-tastic", so it looks more
like two stems blended into a single phonological word.

--And.