Chapter 3. The plausibility of approaches to syntactic alternation of Hungarian verbs

Several – lexical and constructional – approaches have been proposed in the literature to theoretically treat syntactically alternating verb classes. In this chapter I aim to assess their plausibility on the basis of Kertész and Rákosi’s (this volume, 2012) notion of plausible argumentation and present a lexical-constructional account. I argue that both my proposal in general and my analysis of Hungarian verbs of locative alternation are more plausible than either lexical or constructional accounts are separately. As for the assessment of the plausibility of lexical-constructional theory itself, another current publication of mine (Bibok 2010) should be taken into consideration. The lexical-constructional framework of syntactic alternations is supported by a much wider p-context, namely, by lexical pragmatics, which duly highlights the unavoidable interaction between lexicon and contexts.