Formal Issues in Lexical-Functional Grammar

by Dalrymple, Mary; Kaplan, Ronald M.; Maxwell, John T., III; Zaenen, Annie

• ISBN13: 9781881526377
• ISBN10: 1881526372
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 1994-06-01
• Publisher: Stanford Univ Center for the Study

Summary

Lexical-Functional Grammar was first developed by Joan Bresnan and Ronald M. Kaplan in the late 1970s, and was designed to serve as a medium for expressing and explaining important generalisations about the syntax of human languages and thus to serve as a vehicle for independent linguistic research. An equally important goal was to provide a restricted, mathematically tractable notation that could be interpreted by psychologically plausible and computationally efficient processing mechanisms. The formal architecture of LFG provides a simple set of devices for describing the common properties of all human languages and the particular properties of individual languages. This volume presents work conducted over the past several years at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center, Stanford University, and elsewhere. The different sections link mathematical and computational issues and the analysis of particular linguistic phenomena in areas such as wh-constructions, anaphoric binding, word order and coordination.

Table of Contents

Preface

Formal Architecture

The formal architecture of Lexical Functional Grammar

Lexical Functional Grammar: a formal system for grammatical representation

Nonlocal Dependencies

Long-distance dependencies, constituent structure, and functional uncertainty

Modeling syntactic constrants on anaphoric binding

An algorithm for functional uncertainty

Constituent coordination in lexical functional grammar

Word Order

Formal devices for linguisic generalizations: West Germanic world order in lexical functional grammar

Linear order, syntactic rank, and empty categories: on weak crossover

Semantics and Translation

Projections and semantic description in lexical-functional grammar

Situation semantics and semantic interpretation in constraint-based grammars

Translation by structural correspondences

Mathematical and Computational Issues

Three seductions of computational psycholinguistics

Logic and feature structures

A method for disjunctive constraint satisfaction

The interface between phrasal and functional constraints

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