Formal Issues in Lexical-Functional Grammar

Lexical-Functional Grammar was first developed by John Bresnan and Ronald M. Kaplan in the late 1970s, and was designed to serve as a medium for expressing and explaining important generalizations about the syntax of human languages and thus to serve as a vehicle for independent linguistic research. An equally improtant goal was to provide a restricted, mathmematically tractable notation that could be interpreted by psychologically plausibile and computationally efficient processing mechanism. The Formal architecture of LFG provides a simple set of devices for describing the common properties of all human languages and the particular properties of individual languages.

This volume presents work conducted over the past several years at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center, Stanford University, and elsewhere. The different sections link mathematical and computational issues and the analysis of particular linguistic phenomena in areas such as wh-constructions, anaphoric binding, word order and coordination.

Mary Dalrymple and John T. Maxwell III are researchers in the Natural Language Theory and Technology group at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center. Ronald M. Kaplan is the director of that group at the and a Xerox Research Fellow. Annie Zaenen is the director of the Multilingual Technology and Theory area in the Grenoble Laboratory of the Rank Xerox Research Centre, France. Dalrymple, Kaplan, and Zaenen are also consulting faculty members in the Linguistics Department at Stanford University.

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