A Frame-Based Analysis of Verbal Particles in Hungarian
Kata Balogh, Rainer Osswald · Language, cognition and mind · 2021
Abstract The verbal particle in Hungarian raises a number of intriguing issues for any theory of the syntax-semantics interface. In this article, we aim at a formal account of the semantic contribution of various verbal particles in Hungarian and we show how the semantic representation of the clause can be compositionally derived. We will concentrate on the four frequent particles meg-, le-, el- and fel-. Our approach makes use of a formalized version of Role and Reference Grammar and the framework of decompositional frame semantics. In particular, we give a formal representation of the boundary-setting function of the verbal particle in terms of decompositional frames which builds on a scalar change analysis. We furthermore analyze the interaction of the particle with resultative adjectives and provide a formal model of how their syntactic representations drive their frame-semantic composition.