Syntactic Categories in the Correspondence Architecture

Existing approaches to the notion of syntactic category in Lexical-Functional Grammar are either formally explicit but theoretically inadequate (Kaplan, 1987), or detailed but ill-integrated in the correspondence architecture (Bresnan, 2001; Toivonen, 2003). This paper develops a third approach, excising syntactic categories from the c-structure, modeling them as sets of privative features, and situating them in a corresponding x-structure. This allows for the elimination of X' levels as theoretical primitives, while maintaining straightforward definitions of the notion of syntactic projection, of non-projecting words (Toivonen 2003), and of endocentric structure-function mappings (Bresnan 2001). An application of the system in the domain of paradigmatic morphology (Stump 2001) is also suggested.