Calls: Lexical-Functional Grammar, Ling in the Schools Editor for this issue: Renee Galvis As a matter of policy, LINGUIST discourages the use of abbreviations or acronyms in conference announcements unless they are explained in the text. Lexical Functional Grammar (LFG) is a linguistic theory which studies the var- ious aspects of. Bresnan (1982) is a collection of influential early papers in LFG.
Lexical functional grammar ( LFG) is a in. It posits two separate levels of syntactic structure, a representation of word order and constituency, and a representation of grammatical functions such as subject and object, similar to. The development of the theory was initiated by and in the 1970s, in reaction to the theory of which was current in the late 1970s. It mainly focuses on, including its relation with. There has been little LFG work on (although ideas from have recently been popular in LFG research). Contents.Overview LFG views language as being made up of multiple dimensions of structure.
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Each of these dimensions is represented as a distinct structure with its own rules, concepts, and form. The primary structures that have figured in LFG research are:. the representation of grammatical functions ( f-structure). See. the structure of syntactic constituents ( c-structure). See,.For example, in the sentence The old woman eats the falafel, the c-structure analysis is that this is a sentence which is made up of two pieces, a noun phrase (NP) and a verb phrase (VP).
The VP is itself made up of two pieces, a verb (V) and another NP. The NPs are also analyzed into their parts.
Finally, the bottom of the structure is composed of the words out of which the sentence is constructed. The f-structure analysis, on the other hand, treats the sentence as being composed of attributes, which include such as number and or functional units such as, or.There are other structures which are hypothesized in LFG work:. argument structure (a-structure), a level which represents the number of arguments for a predicate and some aspects of the lexical semantics of these arguments.
See. semantic structure (s-structure), a level which represents the meaning of phrases and sentences. See.
information structure (i-structure). morphological structure (m-structure). phonological structure (p-structure)The various structures can be said to be mutually constraining.The LFG conception of linguistic structure differs from theories, which have always involved separate levels of constituent structure representation mapped onto each other sequentially, via transformations. The LFG approach has had particular success with, languages in which the relation between structure and function is less direct than it is in languages like English; for this reason LFG's adherents consider it a more plausible universal model of language.Another feature of LFG is that grammatical-function changing operations like are relations between word forms rather than sentences.
This means that the active-passive relation, for example, is a relation between two types of verb rather than two trees. Active and passive verbs involve alternative mapping of the participants to grammatical functions.Through the positing of productive processes in the lexicon and the separation of structure and function, LFG is able to account for syntactic patterns without the use of transformations defined over syntactic structure. For example, in a sentence like What did you see?, where what is understood as the object of see, transformational grammar puts what after see (the usual position for objects) in 'deep structure', and then moves it. LFG analyzes what as having two functions: question-focus and object.
It occupies the position associated in English with the question-focus function, and the constraints of the language allow it to take on the object function as well.A central goal in LFG research is to create a model of grammar with a depth which appeals to linguists while at the same time being efficiently and having the rigidity of formalism which computational linguists require. Because of this, computational parsers have been developed and LFG has also been used as the theoretical basis of various tools, such as 's TranSphere, and the Julietta Research Group's Lekta.See also., a theory of the syntax-semantics interface.References. Bresnan, Joan (2001).
Lexical-Functional Syntax. Blackwell. Bresnan, Joan; Asudeh, Ash; Toivonen, Ida; Wechsler, Stephen (2015). Lexical Functional Syntax. Wiley Blackwell. Dalrymple, Mary (2001).
Lexical Functional Grammar. 42 in Syntax and Semantics Series. New York: Academic Press.
Falk, Yehuda N. Lexical-Functional Grammar: An Introduction to Parallel Constraint-Based Syntax. CSLI. Kroeger, Paul R. Analyzing Syntax: A Lexical-Functional Approach. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.External links.
. 'In LFG, the structure of a sentence consists of two distinct formal objects: Constituent-structure of the familiar kind plus a functional structure (or F-structure) which displays certain additional kinds of information. Most important in the F-structure is the labeling of grammatical relations like and (these are called grammatical functions in LFG). 'The first part of the name reflects the fact that a great deal of work is done by the lexical entries, the ' part of the framework. Lexical entries are usually rich and elaborate, and each one from a lexical item (such as write, writes, wrote, written and writing) has its own lexical entry.
Lexical entries are responsible for dealing with many relations and processes handled by different machinery in other frameworks; an example is the contrast between and.' (Robert Lawrence Trask and Peter Stockwell, Language and Linguistics: The Key Concepts, 2nd ed. Routledge, 2007).
Different Kinds of Structures 'A is rich in structures of different kinds: sounds form recurring patterns and, words form phrases, grammatical functions emerge from morphological and phrasal structure, and patterns of phrases evoke a complex meaning. These structures are distinct but related; each structure contributes to and constrains the structure of other kinds of information. Linear precedence and phrasal organization are related both to the morphological structure of words and to the functional organization of sentences. And the functional structure of a sentence-relations like subject-of, object-of, modifier-of, and so on-is crucial to determining what the sentence means. 'Isolating and defining these structures and the relations between them is a central task of. ' Lexical Functional Grammar recognizes two different kinds of syntactic structures: the outer, visible hierarchical organization of words into phrases, and the inner, more abstract hierarchical organization of grammatical functions into complex functional structures. Languages vary greatly in the phrasal organization they allow, and in the order and means by which grammatical functions are realized.
May be more or less constrained, or almost completely free. In contrast the more abstract functional organization of languages varies comparatively little: languages with widely divergent phrasal organization nevertheless exhibit subject, object, and properties that have been well-studied by traditional for centuries.' (Mary Dalrymple, John Lamping, Fernando Pereira, and Vijay Saraswat, 'Overview and Introduction.' Semantics and Syntax in Lexical Functional Grammar: The Resource Logic Approach, ed. By Mary Dalrymple.
The MIT Press, 1999).