Remarks on a novel LFG approach to spatial particle verb constructions in Hungarian

Abstract

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.

Hungarian auxiliaries revisited

“…In what follows, we present a brief overview of the approach types that we consider the most fundamental. 1 We partly based our summary on the literature surveys written by Kenesei (2001) and Laczkó (2014), which provide further details on this subject.…”

“…This list of criteria comprises 18 partially interrelated items, five of which are crucial for identifying Hungarian auxiliaries in Kenesei's framework. Laczkó (2014) summarizes these in the following way: (1) Hungarian auxiliaries have defective paradigms. (2) They cannot function as semantic predicates of sentences.…”

“…Regarding the latter issue, we suggest the following studies: É. Kiss (2004) for a Chomskyan generative account, Laczkó (2014) for Lexical-Functional Grammar, Imrényi (2013) for projective dependency grammar, and Tolcsvai Nagy (2010) for a functional cognitive linguistic framework.…”