Hungarian Particle Verbs Revisited: Representational, Derivational, and Implementational Issues from an LFG Perspective

In this paper, I will make a systematic and critical comparison between two salient approaches to Hungarian particle verb constructions (PVCs): (i) a fully and uniformly lexicalist treatment proposed by Ackerman (2003) and Ackerman et al. (2011); (ii) a mixed analysis developed by Forst et al. (2010) and Laczkó & Rákosi (2011), whose essence is that non-compositional PVCs receive a special lexical treatment, while compositional PVCs are handled by means of a particular syntactic predicate composition. After discussing various processes involving PVCs, e.g. preverb-reduplication and various types of derivation, I will conclude that the uniform lexical treatment is more appealing LFG theoretically and it is also more plausible. At the same time, I will claim that the analysis I have developed has several advantages over the (rather programmatic) approach advocated by Ackerman (2003) and Ackerman et al. (2011).