Lexical Functional Grammar

The term Lexical Functional Grammar (LFG) first appeared in print in the 1982 volume edited by Joan Bresnan: The Mental Representation of Grammatical Relations, the culmination of many years of research. LFG differs from both transformational grammar and relational grammar in assuming a single level of syntactic structure. LFG rejects syntactic movement of constituents as the mechanism by which the surface syntactic realization of arguments is determined, and it disallows alteration of grammatical relations within the syntax. A unique constituent structure, corresponding to the superficial phrase structure tree, is postulated. This is made possible by an enriched lexical component that accounts for regularities in the possible mappings of arguments into syntactic structures. For example, the alternation in the syntactic position in which the logical object (theme argument) appears in corresponding active and passive sentences has been viewed by many linguists as fundamentally syntactic in nature, resulting, within transformational grammar, from syntactic movement of constituents. However, LFG eliminates the need for a multi-level syntactic representation by allowing for such alternations to be accomplished through regular, universally constrained, productive lexical processes that determine multiple sets of associations of arguments (such as agent, theme) with grammatical functions (such as SUBJECT, OBJECT)— considered within this framework to be primitives—which then map directly into the syntax. This dissociation of syntactic structure from predicate argument structure (a rejection of Chomsky's Projection Principle, in essence) is crucial to the LFG framework. The single level of syntactic representation, constituent structure (c-structure), exists simultaneously with a functional structure (f-structure) representation that integrates the information from c-structure and from the lexicon. While c-structure varies somewhat across languages, the f-structure representation, which contains all necessary information for the semantic interpretation of an utterance, is claimed to be universal.