Minimal C-structure:Rethinking Projection in Phrase Structure
Joseph Lovestrand, John J. Lowe · SOAS Research Online (SOAS University of London) · 2017
This paper addresses the formal properties of constituent structure (cstructure). We demonstrate inadequacies in the formalization of traditional X0 theory by Bresnan (2001) and Bresnan et al. (2016), and in the alternative proposal of Marcotte (2014). We propose “minimal c-structure” as a new approach to phrase structure within Lexical-Functional Grammar, which almost entirely eliminates non-branching nodes, and neatly captures the distinction between projecting and non-projecting words. Our proposal is fully formalized, and has been successfully tested by an XLE implementation.