A Resource Sensitive Interpretation of Lexical Functional Grammar

This paper investigates whether the fundamental linguistic insights and intuitions of Lexical-Functional Grammar (LFG), which is usually presented as a “constraintbased” linguistic theory, can be reformulated in a “resource-sensitive” framework. In the approach investigated here, LFG’s f-descriptions are replaced with expressions from a multi-modal propositional logic (with permutation and limited contraction). It turns out that some linguistic analyses that required non-monotonic devices in LFG (such as the “constraint equations” in the Andrews (1982) analysis of Icelandic) can be straight-forwardly expressed in the framework presented here. Moreover, a CurryHoward correspondence between proofs in this logic and -terms provides a semantic interpretation as a by-product of the process of showing syntactic well-formedness.