Lexical-Functional Syntax

Lexical-Functional Syntax is the definitive text for Lexical-Functional Grammar in the field of syntax. Complete with integrated pedagogy and problem sets to support the text, this book provides an accessible, empirically motivated treatment of the mathematical architecture of LFG. It also covers the theoretical linguistic ideas that LFG can model, and discusses the wide range of crosslinguistic syntactic phenomena to which it has been applied. The volume is essential to students and researchers who wish to look outside the Chomskyan framework for syntax. It shows why the Chomskyan formal architecture of structural transformations is less attractive for certain types of syntactic phenomena than an architecture of imperfect correspondences between parallel information structures. The book also illustrates how the best ideas from the transformational framework can be captured in a natural way. It gives a clear introduction to the fundamentals of a feature-logic based framework for syntax and provides extensive discussion of crosslinguistic applications, of particular interest to practitioners of feature-logic based approaches such as HPSG and Categorical Unification Grammar.

Joan Bresnan is Sadie Dernham Patek Professor of Humanities and Professor of Linguistics at Stanford University and, formerly, at MIT. She is a past-president of the Linguistic Society of America and a member of the Executive Committee of the International Lexical-Functional Grammar Association. She is co-editor, with Alex Alsina and Peter Sells, of Complex Predicates (1997).