Twentieth Century Linguistics at Closing Time

This chapter appraises the state of linguistics at the end of the twentieth century in the wake of the Generative/Interpretive Semantics episode. The period saw a huge upswing in Noam Chomsky’s influence with the dominance of his Government and Binding/Principles and Parameters model, but also the development of multiple other competing and intersecting formal models, all of which did away with Chomsky’s totemic concept, the transformation: Relational Grammar (RG), Lexical-Functional Grammar (LFG), Generalized Phrase Structure Grammar (GPSG), and so many more that Frederick Newmeyer tagged the lot of them Alphabet Grammars (AGs). Alongside these frameworks came George Lakoff’s most far-reaching and influential development, with philosopher, Mark Johnson, “Conceptual Metaphor Theory” (a label the author rejects).

Gender Representation in the Lexical Functional Grammar

Gender marking is a language universal, although some languages have a stronger Gender-marking grammar. The Lexical Functional Grammar (LFG), a linguistic theory, has a set of rules and levels to render for Gender marking. Bornee and developed within the larger framework of the Generative Grammar, the Lexical Functional Grammar has become a standalone autonomous theoretical theory. This paper draws data from French language to present a comprehensive development of Gender-marking analysis within the Lexical Functional Grammar Framework. Fundamentally, the LSG posits for four phrase structures, which are the C-structure representing lexical entries, the F-structure, which deals with the functional information, the A-structure, which structures predicate-argument relationships, and the ơ-structure, which handles semantic representations. Although the grammatical gender is arrayed all over the four structures, it is mainly presented in this paper as a feature in the lexicon, typically integrated in the C-structure and F-structure mapping.

Introduction

Modular design of grammar: Linguistics on the edge presents the cutting edge of research on linguistic modules and interfaces in Lexical-Functional Grammar (LFG). LFG has a highly modular design that models the linguistic system as a set of discreet submodules that include, among others, constituent structure, functional structure, argument structure, semantic structure, and prosodic structure, with each module having its coherent properties and being related to each other by correspondence functions. The contributions in this volume represent the broad range and interconnection of theoretical, formal, and descriptive considerations that continues to be the hallmark of LFG.

Meaning in LFG

This chapter discusses how meaning has been handled in Lexical-Functional Grammar. As well as giving a historical overview, it also argues that the modern approach, using Glue Semantics, has a number of undesirable properties: meanings do not figure at all in the architecture of the grammar, merely standing in an unspecified correspondence with semantic structures; s-structures themselves have become an enfeebled and unimportant part of the projection architecture; and meaning constructors, when written in the ‘new glue’ format, give the impression of being quite distinct from other kinds of functional annotation, making the semantic component seem out of sync with the rest of the formalism. To remedy these issues, Findlay suggests a mechanism for representing meanings explicitly in s-structures, and for integrating linear logic into the description language of LFG more generally. This has immediate benefits for the analysis of idioms and for the theory of the semantics-information structure interface.

Modular Design of Grammar

Modular design of grammar: Linguistics on the edge presents the cutting edge of research on linguistic modules and interfaces in Lexical-Functional Grammar (LFG). LFG has a highly modular design that models the linguistic system as a set of discreet submodules that include, among others, constituent structure, functional structure, argument structure, semantic structure, and prosodic structure, with each module having its coherent properties and being related to each other by correspondence functions. Following a detailed introduction, Part I scrutinises the nature of linguistic structures, interfaces and representations in LFG’s architecture and ontology. Parts II and III are concerned with problems, analyses and generalisations associated with linguistic phenomena which are of long-standing theoretical significance, including agreement, reciprocals, possessives, reflexives, raising, subjecthood, and relativisation, demonstrating how these phenomena can be naturally accounted for within LFG’s modular architecture. Part IV explores issues of the synchronic and diachronic dynamics of syntactic categories in grammar, such as unlike category coordination, fuzzy categorial edges, and consequences of decategorialization, providing explicit LFG solutions to such problems including those which result from language change in progress. The final part re-examines and refines the precise representations and interfaces of syntax with morphology, semantics and pragmatics to account for challenging facts such as suspended affixation, prosody in multiple question word interrogatives and information structure, anaphoric dependencies, and idioms.

Revisiting the configurationality issue in Old Icelandic

The status of Old Icelandic with respect to (argument) configurationality was subject to debate in the early 1990s (e.g. Faarlund 1990; Rögnvaldsson 1995) and remains unresolved. Since this work, further research on a wide range of languages has enhanced our understanding of configurationality, in particular within Lexical Functional Grammar (e.g. Austin & Bresnan 1996; Nordlinger 1998) and syntactically annotated Old Icelandic data are now available (Wallenberg et al. 2011). It is thus fitting to revisit the matter. In this paper, I show that allowing for argument configurationality as a gradient property, and also taking into account discourse configurationality (Kiss 1995) as a further gradient property, can neatly account for word order patterns in this early stage of Icelandic. Specifically, I show that corpus data supports part of the original claim in Faarlund (1990), that Old Icelandic lacks a VP-constituent, thus being somewhat less argument-configurational than the modern language. Furthermore, the observed word order patterns indicate a designated topic position in the postfinite domain, thus reflecting some degree of discourse configurationality at this early stage of the language.

A Prolog-based approach to Arabic syntax and semantics

This paper introduces a computational approach to Arabic syntax. The approach uses the Lexical Functional Grammar (LFG) framework. Semantic networks and frames were used to handle computational semantics using lambda notation. This was implemented in Prolog using Definite Clause Grammar (DCG) as a formalism for analyzing and generating syntactic structure.

French de and en as expressions of the genitive case: a unified analysis within LFG and computational implementation in XLE

ABSTRACT The French clitic pro-form en represents a wide range of heterogeneous constituents: de-PP complements and adjuncts, partitive objects, and prepositionless objects of cardinals. The main goal of this paper is to formalize this relationship computationally in terms of genitive case. This is apparently the first non-transformational counterpart to Kayne (1975)’s unified analysis, which derives en from a deep structure with de by means of syntactic transformations. Transformational grammars are problematic from the parsing perspective. In order to test our analysis automatically on a large amount of data, we implemented it in a computational grammar of French in the Lexical-Functional Grammar (LFG) formalism using the XLE system. This non-transformational framework is particularly fit for expressing systematic relationships between heterogeneous structures and has successfully been used for the implementation of natural language grammars since the 1980s. We tested the implementation on 320 grammatical sentences and on an equal number of ungrammatical examples. It analyzed all grammatical examples and blocked almost 95% of the ungrammatical ones, showing a high empirical adequacy of the grammar.

On the Performative Use of the Past Participle in German

In German, past participles not only occur in root position with a directive force, as in Stillgestanden! ‘Stop!’ lit. ‘stood still(ptcp)’, but also as performatives in responses: A: Du sagst also nichts zu Papi. ‘So you won’t tell dad.’ B: Versprochen! ‘I promise!’ lit. ‘promised(ptcp)’. Here B performs the speech act denoted by the verb by saying that it has been performed. The propositional argument of the participle (what is promised) is resolved contextually, and the agent and the recipient arguments are restricted to the speaker and the hearer, respectively. This article presents a syntactic analysis of this rarely studied phenomenon, arguing that the construction with a performative participle is not ellipsis but an IP with a participial head and null pronominal complements. The syntactic analysis is formalized within Lexical-Functional Grammar. A pragmatic analysis is proposed arguing that the performative participle in its core use alternates with Yes! to express agreement with an assertion or compliance with a request, that is, to express consent to the effect that a proposition p may safely be added to the Common Ground. This analysis is cast within the dialogue framework of Farkas & Bruce (2010) and extended to response performative participles in monological uses.*