The Handbook of Lexical Functional Grammar

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