2: Functional Structure
Mary Dalrymple · 2001
Lexical Functional Grammar (LFG) assumes two different ways of representing syntactic structure, the constituent structure or c-structure and the functional structure or f-structure. These two structures constitute two subsystems of the overall system of linguistic structures. This chapter presents motivation for the categories and information appearing in functional structure and outlines some common characteristics of functional structure categories. It shows that syntactic subcategorization requirements, a characterization of the array of syntactic arguments required by a predicate, are best stated in functional terms. The chapter discusses the formal representation of functional structure and constraints on f-structure representations. It provides the LFG view with other theoretical approaches to the definition and treatment of functional structure. The chapter also discusses proposals by Hale and others for representing abstract syntactic structure, relations like SUBJ and OBJ, by means of phrase structure trees.