Lexical-Functional Syntax E-Book

Joan Bresnan

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Serie: Blackwell Textbooks in Linguistics
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 673

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2015

Beschreibung

Lexical-Functional Syntax, 2nd Edition, the definitive text for Lexical Functional Grammar (LFG) with a focus on syntax, is updated to reflect recent developments in the field.

• Provides both an introduction to LFG and a synthesis of major theoretical developments in lexical-functional syntax over the past few decades
• Includes in-depth discussions of a large number of syntactic phenomena from typologically diverse languages
• Features extensive problem sets and solutions in each chapter to aid in self-study
• Incorporates reader feedback from the 1st Edition to correct errors and enhance clarity

Leseprobe

Blackwell Textbooks in Linguistics

The books included in this series provide comprehensive accounts of some of the most central and most rapidly developing areas of research in linguistics. Intended primarily for introductory and post-introductory students, they include exercises, discussion points and suggestions for further reading.

Liliane Haegeman,

Introduction to Government and Binding Theory

(Second Edition)

Andrew Spencer,

Morphological Theory

Helen Goodluck,

Language Acquisition

Ronald Wardhaugh and Janet M. Fuller,

An Introduction to Sociolinguistics

(Seventh Edition)

Martin Atkinson,

Children's Syntax

Diane Blakemore,

Understanding Utterances

Michael Kenstowicz,

Phonology in Generative Grammar

Deborah Schiffrin,

Approaches to Discourse

John Clark, Colin Yallop, and Janet Fletcher,

An Introduction to Phonetics and Phonology

(Third Edition)

Natsuko Tsujimura,

An Introduction to Japanese Linguistics

(Third Edition)

Robert D. Borsley,

Modern Phrase Structure Grammar

Nigel Fabb,

Linguistics and Literature

Irene Heim and Angelika Kratzer,

Semantics in Generative Grammar

Liliane Haegeman and Jacqueline Guéron,

English Grammar: A Generative Perspective

Stephen Crain and Diane Lillo-Martin,

An Introduction to Linguistic Theory and Language Acquisition

Joan Bresnan, Ash Asudeh, Ida Toivonen and Stephen Wechsler,

Lexical-Functional Syntax

(Second Edition)

Barbara A. Fennell,

A History of English: A Sociolinguistic Approach

Henry Rogers,

Writing Systems: A Linguistic Approach

Benjamin W. Fortson IV,

Indo-European Language and Culture: An Introduction

(Second Edition)

Liliane Haegeman,

Thinking Syntactically: A Guide to Argumentation and Analysis

Mark Hale,

Historical Linguistics: Theory and Method

Henning Reetz and Allard Jongman,

Phonetics: Transcription, Production, Acoustics and Perception

Bruce Hayes,

Introductory Phonology

Betty J. Birner,

Introduction to Pragmatics

Ronald Wardhaugh and Janet M. Fuller,

An Introduction to Sociolinguistics

Lexical-Functional Syntax

Second Edition

Joan Bresnan

Stanford University

Ash Asudeh

University of Oxford & Carleton University

Ida Toivonen

Carleton University

Stephen Wechsler

The University of Texas at Austin

This second edition first published 2016

© 2016 Joan Bresnan, Ash Asudeh, Ida Toivonen, and Stephen Wechsler

Edition History: Blackwell Publishers Ltd (1e, 2001)

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Bresnan, Joan, author.  Lexical-functional syntax / Joan Bresnan. -- Second edition.   pages cm. -- (Blackwell textbooks in linguistics)  Includes bibliographical references and index.  ISBN 978-1-4051-8781-7 (paperback)  1. Grammar, Comparative and general--Syntax. 2. Lexical-functional grammar. I. Title.  P291.B726 2015  415--dc23 2015006866

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Cover image: © dpaint / Shutterstock

Contents

Preface to the First Edition

What is LFG?

How is it different?

What is in this book?

What is not in this book?

How to use this book

Preface to the Second Edition

Acknowledgments

First edition

Second edition

Part I: Motivation for the LFG Architecture

Introduction

Note

Chapter 1: Nonconfigurationality

Further reading

Notes

Chapter 2: Movement Paradoxes

2.1 Theoretical assumptions

Further reading and discussion

Notes

Chapter 3: Lexicality and Argument Structure

3.1 Two approaches to passive relation changes

3.2 The lexicality of relation changes

3.3 Passivization with and without movement

Further reading and discussion

Notes

Part II: Formally Modeling the Architecture

Introduction

Chapter 4: A Formal Model of Syntactic Structure

4.1 Design principles

4.2 The definition of f-structures

4.3 The description of f-structures

4.4 The correspondence between c- and f-structures

4.5 The solution algorithm

Problems

4.6 Defining versus constraining equations

4.7 Completeness and coherence

Problems

4.8 Functional uncertainty

23

4.9 Sets of f-structures

4.10 Conclusion

Further reading

Notes

Chapter 5: Monotonicity and Some of Its Consequences

5.1 Monotonicity

5.2 Relation changes and monotonicity

5.3 Information and form

5.4 Conclusion

Notes

Part III: Inflectional Morphology and Phrase Structure Variation

Introduction

Chapter 6: A Theory of Structure–Function Mappings

6.1 Grammatical functions

6.2 The organization of c-structure categories

Problems

6.3 Exocentric categories

6.4 Toward a typology

6.5 Effects of economy of expression

Further reading and discussion

Appendix: X′ theory

Notes

Chapter 7: Endocentricity and Heads

7.1 Head mobility

7.2 Endocentricity and extended heads

7.3 Distributed exponence

7.4 Conclusion

Problems

Exercise

Notes

Chapter 8: Pronoun Incorporation and Agreement

8.1 Chicheŵa

8.2 Navajo

Exercise 1

Exercise 2

8.3 Plains Cree and inverse agreement

Exercise 3

Problems

Two types of agreement: INDEX and concord

Exercise 4

Conclusion

Further reading and discussion

Notes

Chapter 9: Topicalization and Scrambling

9.1 English topicalization

9.2 Russian topicalization

9.3 Economy of expression

Problems

Topicalization versus scrambling

9.5 Detecting empty categories

Exercise

Further reading and discussion

Notes

Part IV: On Functional Structures: Binding, Predication, and Control

Introduction

Chapter 10: Basic Binding Theory

10.1 Basic concepts

10.2 A toy binding theory

10.3 Principle C

Further reading and discussion

10.4 Formalization of the binding constraints

Notes

Chapter 11: Types of Bound Anaphors

11.1 Dimensions of anaphoric binding

11.2 Icelandic: subjective and anti-subjective pronouns

11.3 Norwegian: subjective/nuclear pronouns

11.4 Logophoricity versus subjectivity

Further reading and discussion

11.5 The typology of reflexives and the origins of nuclearity

Further reading and discussion

11.6 Formalization

Notes

Chapter 12: Predication Relations

12.1 Predicate complements versus adjuncts

12.2 F-structures of XCOMPs

Exercise 1

Exercise 2

12.3 F-structure of PP complements

12.4 C-structure of predicate complements

12.5 Raising

Further reading and discussion

Notes

Chapter 13: Anaphoric Control

13.1 Gerundive versus participial VPs in English

13.2 Structure of gerundive VPs

13.3 Anaphoric control versus functional control

13.4 Conclusion

Problems

Further reading and discussion

Notes

Chapter 14: From Argument Structure to Functional Structure

14.1 What is argument structure?

14.2 The theory of a-structures

14.3 Mapping a-structures to syntactic functions

14.4 Examples and consequences

Problems

Further reading and discussion

Notes

Problem Sets and Solutions

Introduction

Problem Set 1

P1.1 Warlpiri

P1.2 Monsters and how to avoid them

Problem Set 2

P2.1 Spanish

P2.2 Moroccan Arabic

P2.3 Irish

P2.4 Noun incorporation in Greenlandic

Note

Problem Set 3

P3.1 C-structures and grammatical functions

P3.2 Subjecthood

P3.3 Ivatan syntax

P3.4 Sinhala c-structure

P3.5 Barasano c-structure

Problem Set 4

P4.1 German word order

P4.2 Person and number marking in Wambaya

P4.3 Head-marking in K’ichee’

P4.4 Subject agreement in West Flemish

Notes

Problem Set 5

P5.1 Discontinuous dependencies in open complement constructions

P5.2 Case and grammatical functions

P5.3 Anaphoric binding

Problem Set 6

P6.1 Unaccusatives

P6.2 Reflexives: Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian

P6.3 Passive, causative, and applicative in Chicheŵa

Notes

Solutions to Selected Problems

Problem Set 1

Problem Set 2

Problem Set 4

Note

References for the Problems

Problem Set 1

Problem Set 2

Problem Set 3

Problem Set 4

Problem Set 5

Problem Set 6

References

Language Index

Subject Index

EULA

List of Tables

Chapter 6

Table 6.1

Problem Set 6

Table P6.1

Table P6.2

Guide

Cover

Table of Contents

Preface

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Preface to the First Edition

What is LFG?

LFG (lexical-functional grammar) is a theory of grammar which has a powerful, flexible, and mathematically well-defined grammar formalism designed for typologically diverse languages. LFG has provided the framework for a substantial amount of descriptive and theoretical research on many languages, including those in Australia (Warlpiri and Wambaya), America (Navajo, Plains Cree, Greenlandic), Europe (Welsh, Irish, English, German, Dutch, West Flemish, Icelandic, Norwegian, Finnish, Russian, Serbian/Croatian), Africa (Chicheŵa, Ewe, Moroccan Arabic), South Asia (Malayalam, Hindi), and East Asia (Japanese) which are discussed and analyzed in the text and problem sets of this book.

How is it different?

LFG is closely attuned to the overt perceptible expressions of language, and to the abstract relational information that they directly express. LFG has a constraint-based, parallel correspondence architecture; it has no serial derivations (unlike transformational grammar); there are no “deep structures” or “initial structures.” Abstract relations are locally distributed as partial information across words and overt fragments of structure, and may be monotonically synthesized in any order or in parallel. Being designed for a wide range of nonconfigurational and configurational language types, LFG departs radically from most other grammar formalisms in one striking way: it is noncompositional, allowing the “content” of a constituent to vary depending on its context.

These descriptions may sound mysterious to the newcomer, but LFG is simple. Field linguists doing primary research on languages have found it easy to use. And because LFG is mathematically well defined and simple, it is also easy to implement. It has been employed in many computational systems, ranging from state-of-the-art industrial wide-coverage grammars used for machine translation and processing to pedagogical systems implemented on personal computers.

LFG is being used as a representational basis in the new crop of data-driven approaches to language, including Optimality Theoretic syntax and probabilistic analysis of natural language. There is an International Lexical-Functional Grammar Association (ILFGA), and there are various websites for LFG resources, the main one being:

http://www.essex.ac.uk/linguistics/external/LFG/

What is in this book?

This book provides both an introduction to LFG and a synthesis of major theoretical developments in lexical-functional syntax since the mid to late 1980s. It can be used both as a textbook for students and as a reference text for researchers. Many references to current work are given, but the only background required is some familiarity with elementary formal constructs such as the definition of functions and relations, and an understanding of the basic syntactic concepts of constituent structure and X′ theory (such as in the short paper by Bresnan 1977). The problem sets provide a hands-on way of learning to use the formalism, analytic concepts, and variety of linguistic ideas that can be expressed.

What is not in this book?

Research in LFG is the cooperative effort of an international community of diverse researchers, of which the first author of this book – though one of the original developers of the theory – is just one. The goal of presenting a coherent and accessible view of the major developments in lexical-functional syntax has inevitably led to some neglect of important topics and alternatives. The deliberate omissions are these. We have omitted coverage of Optimality Theoretic syntax based on LFG (sometimes called “OT-LFG”); references can be found in Bresnan (2000, 2001a,b) and Sells (2001a), among others, but this area has grown rapidly since the publication of the first edition. We have also omitted any account of probabilistic analysis of language using LFG, such as Data-Oriented Parsing (“DOP-LFG”); see Bod and Kaplan (1998), Johnson et al. (1999), and Bod (1999) for several different approaches. This book is devoted to lexical-functional syntax and makes no attempt to cover current research in semantics within the LFG framework. (See Dalrymple 1999 for one recent line of research in semantics for LFG.) Constructive Morphology is also not covered. (See Nordlinger 1998a, Barron 1998, Sadler 1998, Sells 1999, Lee 1999a,b, and Sharma 1999). New developments in coordination and feature resolution also had to be omitted because of time and space constraints (Dalrymple and Kaplan 1997, 2000). The history of the development of LFG and its relation to other theories is also omitted and awaits other authors. Despite these omissions, the reader of this book will have no trouble following current research, which can be closely tracked from the website resources mentioned above.

How to use this book

In teaching LFG from this text, we do not attempt to teach all of the formalism developed in Part II at once. Instead we break Chapter 4 into three parts:

Sections 4.1–4.5, followed by Problem Set 1;

Sections 4.6–4.7, followed by Problem Set 2;

Sections 4.8–4.9 (read with Chapter 9).

Preface to the Second Edition

The second edition of this book preserves the structure and aims of the first edition, but updates the work by adding expositions of new developments closely related to the topics of the first edition. The latter include new sections on agreement and concord (Chapter 8), on predication (Chapter 12), and on morphology that adds or suppresses argument structure roles (Chapter 14), as well as more explicit analyses of the flow of information in conjoined clauses in Wambaya (Chapter 7) and Russian (Chapter 9). There are also additions to the problem sets, including new in-chapter exercises and many problems based on languages not discussed in the first edition. The range of languages that have attracted research in LFG has been steadily expanding and now also includes substantial work on further varieties of Arabic, Biak, Bulgarian, Cantonese and Mandarin Chinese, Dagaare, Danish, Dargwa, Fijian, Ancient and Modern Greek, Hebrew, Hungarian, Indonesian, Kaqchikel, K’ichee’, Latin, Maltese, Murrinh-Patha, Ossetic, Polish, Brazilian and European Portuguese, Sanskrit, Swedish, Thai, Tigrinya, and Turkish, among many others. The second edition also includes revisions to incorporate the corrections and suggestions of many users of the first edition and to remove difficulties for the reader and student.

Like the first edition, the second edition does not cover all important topics in LFG. Complex predicates and coordination are two examples of omission. In general, readers of this text will be well equipped to venture into the literature. On the topic of coordination in particular, Peterson (2004) provides a very readable introduction, and the reader interested in details of the analysis can read that paper in conjunction with the discussions of coordinate Ss in Wambaya (Chapter 7) and Russian (Chapter 9).

Similarly, like the first edition, the second edition focuses on syntax and sets aside developments in semantics and the syntax–semantics interface in LFG. One major thread of such work concerns glue semantics; see Dalrymple (1999, 2001), Asudeh (2012), and references therein.

The first edition preface notes on How to use this book remain as relevant as before. Note that Parts I and II are concerned with the motivation for functional structure, while the theory of lexical and phrasal categories is developed in Part III. Accordingly, the reader should bear in mind that the choice of particular labels for nodes of phrase structure diagrams plays very little role in Parts I and II. The traditional notions of “clause” and “nominal” are assumed, but whether a clause is labeled S, IP, or CP and whether a nominal is labeled NP or DP have little consequence, until the theory of phrase structure categories is presented in Part III, Chapter 6. There a distinction is drawn between endocentric (headed) IP clauses in languages such as English, versus exocentric (headless) S clauses found in many other languages.

Acknowledgments

First edition

Joan Bresnan: It is a pleasure to thank the friends and colleagues who gave me detailed comments on earlier drafts of individual chapters or even the entire manuscript of this work: Farrell Ackerman, Avery Andrews, Judith Berman, Chris Culy, Mary Dalrymple, Yehuda Falk, Paul Kroeger, Helge Lødrup, Elaine Malkin and Stella Markantonatou, Chris Manning, Michiko Nakano, Louisa Sadler, and Peter Sells. The original problem sets and solutions were first edited in 1987 by Kristin Hanson, with the assistance of Heinrich Beck, Nick Clements, Mary Dalrymple, Jeffrey Goldberg, Jonni Kanerva, Yo Matsumoto, James McCloskey, Mariko Saiki, Stephen Wechsler, Michael Wescoat, Annie Zaenen, and Draga Zec. Subsequent contributions were made by Rachel Nordlinger and Ida Toivonen, and Ash Asudeh converted the files to . I owe special thanks to Ron Kaplan for answering questions about formal issues with his usual blend of generosity and rigor, and in providing through Xerox PARC some financial assistance in the research and preparation of the manuscript.

For the personal support which made it possible for me to finish writing this book, and for the inspiration of living with a finisher and a champion, I also thank Marianne.

Second edition

All: We thank the following readers of the first edition for specific comments and corrections, which we have tried to address: Judith Berman, George Aaron Broadwell, William Blunk-Fernandez, Mary Dalrymple, Yehuda Falk, Itamar Francez, One-Soon Her, Florian Jaeger, Ron Kaplan, Tracy Holloway King, Paul Kroeger, Tibor Laczkó, Joan Maling, and Peter Sells. We thank Adam Przepiórkowski for comments and corrections on a draft of the second edition. We also thank the anonymous reviewers of the second edition and our patient editors at Wiley, Danielle Descoteaux and Julia Kirk. Any remaining errors are our own.

We thank students at Carleton University, Oxford University, Stanford University, and UT Austin for their feedback and questions on drafts of the second edition used during teaching. We thank Julian Michael from UT Austin, in particular, for a comprehensive list of notes and errata.

Crystal Bruce, Liz Christie, and Paul Melchin supported preparation of the second edition through research assistantships at Carleton University. We thank Paul in particular for carefully reading drafts, including flagging errors and inconsistencies and raising many interesting questions. Once again, any remaining errors are our own.

For their help with problem sets and data, we would like to thank Alex Alsina and Sam Mchombo (Chicheŵa problem), Telma Can Pixabaj and Nora England (K’ichee’ problem), and Samu Niskanen (Finnish data).

Ash Asudeh: I acknowledge the support of three grants/awards which contributed to the preparation of this volume: an Early Researcher Award from the Province of Ontario, a Standard Research Grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (#410-2006-1650), and an Individual Discovery Grant from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (#371969).

For personal support, I would like to thank Alli Asudeh, Isa Asudeh, Behin Ferguson, George Ferguson, Esra Kaytaz, Shahnaz Khorshidi, Elliott Strikefoot, and Ida Toivonen. Last but most, I thank our kids, Thora, Isak, Alfred, and Harald, for everything. My efforts on this volume are dedicated to them.

Ida Toivonen: I acknowledge the support of a Standard Research Grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (#410-2010-1841). I want to thank my family and friends for all their help and support.

Stephen Wechsler: The writing of this book was supported in part by summer funding from the Alma Madden Cowell Professorship in Linguistics at the University of Texas. I am grateful for that support.

Part IMotivation for the LFG Architecture

Introduction

The search for a universal design of grammar has long motivated research in linguistic theory. Language is both universal among humans and specific to us. Any child can acquire fluent mastery of any of the thousands of human languages, given sufficient exposure, but no animal has this capacity. These simple facts have suggested to many linguists that there must be a universal design of grammar, a common organizing structure of all languages that underlies their superficial variations in modes of expression. If this universal grammar is a biologically given form of knowledge, as many linguists assume today, then study of the invariants of the structure of human languages may tell us something fundamental about the human mind.

This rationalist, universalist conception of linguistics has a long intellectual tradition, appearing in the works of philosophers and grammarians of the past six centuries. In the past century it has been revived by Noam Chomsky. Chomsky’s great achievement is to couple the universalist conception of language from the tradition of philosophical grammar with a far more precise model of linguistic structure adapted from the mathematics of formal systems developed in the twentieth century. This powerful combination of ideas, called “generative grammar,” has revolutionized linguistic theory. In the methodological paradigm of generative grammar, formal representations of linguistic structures are developed and empirically tested against native speakers’ knowledge of their language. Universal grammar limits the space of formal structures.

Generative grammar holds that language cannot be adequately characterized solely in terms of a formal description of its overt constituents, or “surface structure.” A more abstract representation is also needed to represent the implicit linguistic knowledge of speakers. Chomsky has conceived of this abstract representation as a “deep” or initial structure which undergoes sequential serial operations (transformations) to derive the overt perceptible form. It is to explain how these abstract formal structures are acquired by speakers that Chomsky developed his rationalist epistemology: human beings possess an innate faculty specialized for language which enables them to acquire complex human languages despite the poverty of stimulus in their learning environment.1

Towards the end of the twentieth century, new formal ideas began to achieve prominence in linguistic theory, making use of parallel rather than serial structures and computations, and comparative evaluation of multiple overt structures rather than serial derivation of individual overt structures. These ideas are embodied in a family of nonderivational, constraint-based linguistic theories and in approaches based on optimization (both statistical and discrete). These newer theories are compatible with different linguistic epistemologies drawing on structuralist and functional/typological ideas which have both predated and coexisted with generative grammar. One such theory is lexical-functional grammar (LFG) (Kaplan and Bresnan 372), which is the topic of this book.

Part I of this book empirically and informally motivates the LFG architecture by looking at the core linguistic phenomena which inspired it: nonconfigurationality, movement paradoxes, and the lexicality of relation changes such as passivization. Part II shows how the intuitive ideas of Part I can be formally modeled as flexible correspondence mappings between parallel structures (constituent structure and functional structure). Part III presents a theory and typology of structure–function correspondences, together with several case studies of languages in which syntactic functions are created morphologically rather than by constituent structures. Part IV motivates functional structure by showing how invariances of language are captured in functional structures and outlines a theory of how functional structures are projected from argument structures.

Note

1.

Chomsky’s “poverty of stimulus” argument for universal grammar has attracted criticism (e.g. Van Valin 651, Pullum 553, Pullum and Scholz 554). The most controversial aspect is not the conclusion that humans have innate biological capacities or learning biases that support language – no one doubts that the phonological structure of language is supported by our innate articulatory and perceptual systems – but the assumption that such capacities must be narrowly specialized for acquiring grammatical systems – and grammatical systems of the specific types advocated by Chomsky. It is also true that advances in statistical learning theories permit inferences about nonoccurring data which enrich the informativeness of the stimulus (e.g. Tesar and Smolensky 633, Boersma and Hayes 99; for discussion of empirical case studies, see Lidz et al. 433, Foraker et al. 273, Reali and Christiansen 564, Ambridge et al. 31, and Kam et al. 361).

1Nonconfigurationality

One fundamental problem for the design of universal grammar is the great variability in modes of expression of languages. Languages differ radically in the ways in which they form similar ideas into words and phrases. The idea of two small children chasing a dog is expressed in English by means of a phrase structure in which conceptual components of the whole – the concept of the two small children and the concept of the dog being two such components – correspond to single phrases. Phrases are groups of contiguous words that are units for substitutions, remain together as units under stylistic permutations and paraphrases of a sentence, constrain the pronunciation patterns of sentences, and are subject to ordering constraints relative to other words and word groups. The (simplified) phrase structure of an English sentence is illustrated in (1):1

In this structure, the word combinations the two small children and that dog are noun phrases (NPs), in which the words cannot be separated, and there is also a verb phrase (VP). When the phrases are freely broken up, the result is ungrammatical or different in meaning:

The simple correspondence between conceptual units and grammatical phrases seems so natural to the English speaker as to appear a necessary feature of language itself – but it is not. Consider Warlpiri, a language of the people who have inhabited Australia since long before the colonization of that continent by English speakers. Example (3) shows the phrase structure of a Warlpiri sentence expressing the same idea as the English sentence (1). But in Warlpiri, every permutation of the words in the sentence is possible, with the same meaning, so long as the auxiliary (Aux) tense marker occurs in the second position. In particular, the word orders of all the bad English examples in (2) are good in Warlpiri.