Lexical-Functional Grammar

See: Natural Language Syntactic Theory.

• "Lexical-Functional Grammar (Kaplan and Bresnan, 1982; Dalrymple, 2001) minimally involves two levels of syntactic representation:3 c-structure and f-structure. C(onstituent)-structure represents the grouping of words and phrases into larger constituents and is realised in terms of a CFPSG grammar. F(unctional)-structure represents abstract syntactic functions such as SUBJ(ect), OBJ(ect), OBL(ique), closed and open clausal COMP/XCOMP(lement), ADJ(unct), APP(osition) etc. and is implemented in terms of recursive feature structures (attribute-value matrices). C-structure captures surface grammatical configurations, fstructure encodes abstract syntactic information approximating to predicate-argument/dependency structure or simple logical form (van Genabith and Crouch, 1996). C- and f-structures are related in terms of functional annotations (constraints, attribute-value equations) on c-structure rules (cf. Figure 1).” from 2004_LongDistanceDepResolutionInLFGApprox.
• "Lexical functional grammar (LFG) is a theoretical framework in linguistics, a variety of generative grammar. The development of the theory was initiated by Joan Bresnan and Ronald Kaplan in the 1970s, in reaction to the direction research in the area of transformational grammar had begun to take. It mainly focuses on syntax, including its relation with morphology and semantics. There has been little LFG work on phonology (although ideas from Optimality Theory have recently been popular in LFG research). (Wikipedia)
• Lexical Functional Grammar (LFG) Home Page http://www.essex.ac.uk/linguistics/lfg/
  • Lexical Functional Grammar is a theory of grammar -- that is, in general terms, a theory of:
    • syntax (roughly, how words can be combined together to make larger phrases, such as sentences),
    • morphology (how morphemes --- parts of words, such as the parts of writers, namely the verb write, the `agentive affix' er and the plural marker +s --- can be combined to make up words),
    • semantics (how and why various words and combinations of words mean what they mean), and
    • pragmatics (how expressions are used to transmit information).
    • In addition, grammar is often taken to include phonology (the study of the sound systems of human languages), but LFG has relatively little to say about this.
• Kaplan, R. M. and Bresnan, J. W. (1982). Lexical-functional grammar: A formal system for grammatical representation. In Bresnan, J. W., editor, The MentalRepresentation of Grammatical Relations. MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass