A compositional intersective account of Heterofunctional Coordination

The analysis presented in this paper extends the uniform intersective (“boolean”) treatment of conjunctive coordinators to Heterofunctional Coordination (HC), i.e., coordination of different grammatical functions. A compositional account of HC based on mainstream derivational syntax is proposed, one that makes Champollion’s (2015) “quantificational event semantics” compatible with derivational syntax. The analysis is based on the assumption, common in Minimalism, that traces of moved quantifiers denote domain restrictions rather than just variables

Lexical Functional Grammar as a Construction Grammar

Lexical Functional Grammar (LFG) is a lexicalist, constraint-based grammatical theory that shares a lot of the basic assumptions of Construction Grammar (CxG), such as a commitment to surface-oriented descriptions (no transformations), and the simultaneous representation of form, meaning, and other grammatical information (no derivations). Nevertheless, LFG is not standardly viewed as a kind of CxG, in particular since its adherence to the principle of Lexical Integrity means that it insists on a strict morphology-syntax distinction where CxG canonically rejects such a divide. However, such a distinction is in fact entirely compatible with CxG assumptions; the actual problem with viewing LFG as a CxG is the difficulty it has in describing the more substantive end of the schematic-substantive spectrum of constructions. I suggest that by replacing the limited context-free grammar base of LFG responsible for this shortcoming with a more expressive formalism (in this case a description-based tree-adjoining grammar), we can obtain a fully constructional LFG, suitable as a formal framework for CxG

Integrating LFG’s binding theory with PCDRT

We provide a formal model for the interaction of syntax and pragmatics in the interpretation of anaphoric binding constraints on personal and reflexive pronouns. We assume a dynamic semantics, where e-type expressions introduce discourse referents, and contexts are assignments of individuals to discourse referents. We adopt the Partial Compositional Discourse Representation Theory (PCDRT) of Haug (2014b),which models anaphoric resolution in terms of a pragmatically-established relation between discourse referents. We integrate PCDRT into the constraint-based grammatical framework of Lexical-Functional Grammar (LFG), and show how it is possible to state syntactic constraints on the pragmatic resolution of singular and plural anaphora within this framework

Handbook of Lexical Functional Grammar

Lexical Functional Grammar (LFG) is a nontransformational theory of linguistic structure, first developed in the 1970s by Joan Bresnan and Ronald M. Kaplan, which assumes that language is best described and modeled by parallel structures representing different facets of linguistic organization and information, related by means of functional correspondences. This volume has five parts. Part I, Overview and Introduction, provides an introduction to core syntactic concepts and representations. Part II, Grammatical Phenomena, reviews LFG work on a range of grammatical phenomena or constructions. Part III, Grammatical modules and interfaces, provides an overview of LFG work on semantics, argument structure, prosody, information structure, and morphology. Part IV, Linguistic disciplines, reviews LFG work in the disciplines of historical linguistics, learnability, psycholinguistics, and second language learning. Part V, Formal and computational issues and applications, provides an overview of computational and formal properties of the theory, implementations, and computational work on parsing, translation, grammar induction, and treebanks. Part VI, Language families and regions, reviews LFG work on languages spoken in particular geographical areas or in particular language families. The final section, Comparing LFG with other linguistic theories, discusses LFG work in relation to other theoretical approaches

First-Order Glue

Glue has evolved significantly during the past decade. Although the recent move to type-theoretic notation was a step in the right direction, basing the current Glue system on System F (second-order #-calculus) was an unfortunate choice. An extension to two sorts and ad hoc restrictions were necessary to avoid inappropriate composition of meanings. As a result, the current system is unnecessarily complicated. A first-order Glue system is hereby proposed as its replacement. This new system is not only simpler and more elegant as it captures the exact requirements for Gluestyle compositionality without ad-hoc improvisations, but it also turns out to be more powerful than the current two-sorted (pseudo-) secondorder system. First-order Glue supports all existing Glue analyses as well as more elegant alternatives. It also supports new, more demanding analyses