The chapter discusses the so-called Hungarian reduplicating particle verb construction that has generated some interest in the pertinent generative literature on Hungarian. This literature is divided over whether reduplicating particles can bear plural morphology in the presence of a third person plural oblique associate or not: some accept and some reject the resulting agreeing reduplicating particle verb construction, thus creating a par excellence context of data inconsistency. The chapter offers a detailed and critical overview of the literature, and presents some novel arguments in an effort to find a paraconsistent solution to this problem within the framework of the p-model of Kertész and Rákosi (2012). This solution rests and on the claim that the plural and the non-plural reduplicating particle verb constructions are radically different in their grammar, since the particle only acts as a pronominal in the case of the former construction type. The pronominal use of the particle is a marked option, rendering the agreeing reduplicating particle verb construction a marked phenomenon of Hungarian grammar.
In the paper, first we present the essence of our recent analysis of Hungarian particle verb constructions. The main goal of the paper is to explore the nature, consequences and ramifications of this approach in a detailed comparison with certain salient previous accounts which are directly relevant to the assessment of our account from a general theoretical perspective. We claim that our approach, developed in the framework of Lexical-Functional Grammar, has the following two main advantages: (i) it systematically covers both the productive and the non-productive uses of these constructions by offering explicit, principled and implementationally tested analyses; (ii) it develops a treatment of the notoriously miscreant behaviour of particle verbs exhibiting a special mixture of strongly lexical and strongly syntactic properties which, in addition to its feasibility, requires the least dramatic modification in our general assumptions about the lexical and syntactic components of our grammar.
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