Lexical functional grammar

[...]... required by a predicate, are best stated in functional terms The formal representation of functional structure and constraints on f-structure representations are discussed in Section 3 Finally, Section 4 contrasts the LFG view with other theoretical approaches to the definition and treatment of functional structure 8 1 2 Functional Structure FUNCTIONAL INFORMATION AND FUNCTIONAL S T R U C T U R E Abstract...2 FUNCTIONAL STRUCTURE LFG assumes two different ways of representing syntactic structure, the constituent structure or c-structure and the functional structure or f-structure These two structures constitute two subsystems of the overall system of linguistic structures Functional structure is the abstract functional syntactic organization of the sentence,... (1983), upon which much work in Relational Grammar is based: (3) Relational Hierarchy of Relational Grammar: 1 (suBJ) > 2 (oBJ) > 3 (indirect object) The Obliqueness Hierarchy of Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar (Pollard and Sag 1994) also reflects a hierarchy of grammatical functions like this one As demonstrated by a large body of work in Relational Grammar, HPSG, LFG, and other theories, the... syntactic predicate-argument structure and functional relations like subject and object Constituent structure is the overt, more concrete level of linear and hierarchical organization of words into phrases Section 1 of this chapter presents motivation for the categories and information appearing in functional structure and outlines some common characteristics of functional stxucture categories Section... well as configurational means There is a clear and well-defined similarity across languages at this abstract level LFG assumes a universally available inventory of grammatical functions: (4) Lexical Functional Grammar: SUBJeCt, object, oBJ0, COMe, XCOMP, OBLique0, ADJunct, XADmnct The labels o~J0 and O~L0 represent families of relations indexed by semantic roles, with the 0 subscript representing the... 2Relational grammar (Perlmutter and Postal 1983a) also recognizes this basic division of grammatical functions into "term relations" and "oblique relations." Terms are also sometimes referred to as "core functions" (Andrews 1985; Bresnan 2001b) 14 2 Functional Structure AGREEMENT: In some languages, termhood is correlated with verb agreement; in fact, this observation is encoded in Relational Grammar. .. and 3Kroeger attributes example (29) to Schachter (1976) 4The Subject Condition is called the Final 1 Law in Relational Grammar (Frantz 1981; Perlmutter and Postal 1983a) and the Extended Projection Principle in Government and Binding Theory (Chomsky 1981) Functional Information and Functional Structure 19 Kanerva (1989), who attribute it originally to Baker (1983) (see also Andrews 1985; Levin 1987;... used: 30 2 Functional Structure (59) a Lee seems irrational b *The square root o f two seems irrational In s o m e cases, then, r e q u i r e m e n t s that appear to d e p e n d on phrase structure categ o r y p r o v e on closer inspection to be functional or semantic in nature In other cases, however, the particular constituent structure category o f the c o m p l e m e n t is at issue, and no functional. .. 4.3, w e discuss these cases, showing that the phrase structure category o f a c o m p l e m e n t can be specified in these limited cases 3 FUNCTIONAL STRUCTURE REPRESENTATION In L F G , functional i n f o r m a t i o n is f o r m a l l y represented by the functional structure or f-structure Mathematically, the f-structure can be thought o f as a function 1° f r o m attributes to values, or equivalently... constrains relative clause formation by restricting the grammatical function of the argument in the relative clause that is interpreted as coreferent with the modified noun The border between any Functional Information and Functional Structure 9 two adjacent grammatical functions in the hierarchy can represent a distinction between acceptable and unacceptable relative clauses in a language, and different languages . generative grammar. Early transformational grammar proposed the ex- istence of "kernel sentences" (Chomsky 1957), basic simple declarative clauses generated by a simple phrase structure grammar. . assumption of Categorial Grammar (Moortgat 1988; Morrill 1994; Steedman 1996) as well as of Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar (Pollard and Sag 1994), Construction Grammar (Kay 1998), and. LFG shares this view with Relational Grammar (Perlmutter and Postal 1983b) and Arc Pair Grammar (Johnson and Postal i980), as well as with Construction Grammar (Kay 1998). LFG assumes that