1. ACTL 2008 Syntax: Introduction to LFG Peter Austin, Linguistics Department, SOAS with thanks to Kersti Börjars & Nigel Vincent

2. Types of information about linguistic units Syntactic structure, c-structure the dog forms a constituent in (1) Functional information, f-structure the dog is the subject in (1) (1) is in past tense Argument structure, a-structure eat takes two arguments Information structure Phonetic structure … (1)The dog ate the rats.

3. Correspondence between dimensions (1) The dog ate the rats. (2) The rats were eaten by the dog. subject object agent theme dog rats FunctionSemantic role subject object agent theme dog rats FunctionSemantic role

4. Non-one-to-one correspondence  Parallel correspondence approach a-structurec-structure f-structure mapping relations

5. a-structure Information relating to the thematic roles associated with a predicate (3)a.tickle b.like Lexical Mapping Theory maps the arguments onto f- structure. Arguments are represented as features.

6. f-structure: attributes Types of attributes: Functional features NUM PERS TENSE … Semantic featurePRED Grammatical relations SUBJ OBJ ADJUNCT COMP … A feature value matrix: an unordered set of feature-value pair

7. f-structure:values Types of values: Atomic value Value of the functional features: plu, past, 3, fem Semantic formvalue of PRED f-structurevalue of grammatical relations f-structures are reasonably invariant across languages

8. f-structure:examples she The goal keeper smiled.  Semantic feature  Functional features  Grammatical relation  Functional feature Sw hon Sw Målvakten log.

9. c-structure Category labelled trees Categories LexicalS, N, V, P, A, (Adv) FunctionalC, I, D Both endocentric (headed) and exocentric (non-headed) structures allowed Cross linguistic variation

10. c-structure: functional categories Functional categories are used when certain functional features are associated with positional properties (6)a.wita-jarra-rluka-palawajili-pi-nyi small- DUAL - ERGPRES-3DUSUBJ chase- NPAST yalumpu kurdu-jarra-rlumaliki that. ABS child- DUAL-ERG dog.ABS Warlpiri: b.All permutations possible as long as inflectional bundle stays in second position c. IP I’ I ka-pala

11. c-structure: functional categories (7)a.The rats will eat the dog. b.Will the rats eat the dog? English: Special status of auxiliary verbs: (9) IP I’ I NP VP will (8)a.The rats ate the dog. b.*Ate the rats the dog?

12. c-structure: an interlude (10)The rats ate the dog. Principle of Economy of Expression: all phrase structure nodes are optional unless required by independent principles (completeness, coherence, semantic expressivity) (11) IP I’NP VP the dog V ate NP The rats I VP

13. c-structure: “head to head movement” C-structure heads are f-structure heads: XnXn X Complements of functional categories are f-structure co-heads: F’ XP

14. c-structure (10)a.Canisrattosdevoravit. dog. NOM rat. ACC.PL eat. PERF.3SG b.all orders in possible under right information structural conditions Latin: Functional information on verb not associated with position, so no argument for a functional category. (11) S NP V S V Etc.

15. Mapping between f-structure and c-structure IP I’ NP VP The dog NPV atethe rats Position: Spec-IP Position: sister of V Case: nominative Case: accusative S NP V rattoscanisdevoravit S NP V canisrattosdevoravit