Clément, Lionel & Diao, Sekou: For a unified treatment of particle verbs

In this paper, we propose an analysis of particle verbs which allows to construct with the same optimized lexicon non-compositional (idiomatic) and productive compositional particle verb constructions. In the latter case, we do not need any special mechanism to compose a verb and a semantically pertinent particle.

In the case of idiomatic particle verb constructions, a mechanism specific to XLFG was used. This allowed us to propose a preferential choice of the idiomatic expression by adding a special entry in the lexicon.

This way of prioritizing an idiomatic construction, if it exists, and fall back on a compositional construction by default, seems to be coherent with both the FLG formalism and an approach where the lexicon takes a prominent place in the analysis of such phenomena.