Lexical functional grammar

grammatical relations have been studied for thous and of years. Apollonius Dyscolus, a grammarian in Alexandria in the second ce ntury A .D., gave a syntactic description of Greek that characterized the rela tions of nouns to verbs and other words in the sentence, providing an early characte riza ion of transitivity and “foreshadow[ing] the distinction of subject and obj ect” (Robins 1967). The role of the subject and object and the relation of syntact ic predication were fully developed in the Middle Ages by the modistae, or specul ative grammarians (Robins 1967; Covington 1984). More recent work also depends on assuming an underlying abst ract regularity operating crosslinguistically. Modern work on grammatica l relations and syntactic dependencies was pioneered by Tesnière (1959) and c ontinues in the work of Hudson (1984), Mel’čuk (1988), and others working withi n the dependencybased tradition. Typological studies are also frequently d riven by reference to grammatical relations: for instance, Greenberg (1966) sta te his word order universals by reference to subject and object. Thus, LFG aligns itself with approaches in traditional, nontransformational grammatica l work, in which these abstract relations were assumed. 1.1. Distinctions among Grammatical Functions It is abundantly clear that there are differences in the beha vior of phrases depending on their grammatical function. For example, in lang uages exhibiting “superiority” effects, there is an asymmetry between subje cts and nonsubjects in multiple wh-questions , questions with more than one wh-phrase. It is not possible for the object phrase in a wh-question to appear in initial po sition in the sentence if the subject is also a wh-phrase like whator who(Chomsky 1981, Chapter 4): (1) a. Who saw what? b. *What did who see? Not all languages exhibit these effects: for example, King ( 1995, page 56) shows that superiority effects do not hold in Russian. Neverthele ss, many languages do exhibit an asymmetry between subjects and nonsubjects in co nstructions like (1). In fact, however, the subject-nonsubject distinction is on ly e aspect of a rich set of distinctions among grammatical functions. Keenan an d Comrie (1977) propose a more fine-grained analysis of abstract grammatical st ructure, theKeenanComrie hierarchyfor relative clause formation. The Keenan-Comrie hierarch y gives a ranking on grammatical functions that constrains re lativ clause formation by restricting the grammatical function of the argumen t in the relative clause that is interpreted as coreferent with the modified noun. The border between any Functional Information and Functional Structure 9 two adjacent grammatical functions in the hierarchy can rep resent a distinction between acceptable and unacceptable relative clauses in a l anguage, and different languages can set the border at different places on the hiera rchy:1 (2) Keenan-Comrie Hierarchy: SUBJ> DO > IO > OBL > GEN > OCOMP Keenan and Comrie state that “the positions on the Accessibi lity H erarchy are to be understood as specifying a set of possible grammatical di stinctions that a language may make.” In some languages, the hierarchy distingui shes subjects from all other grammatical functions: only the subject of a relat ive clause can be relativized, or interpreted as coreferent with the noun modified by the relative clause. Other languages allow relativization of subjects and objec ts in contrast to other grammatical functions. This more fine-grained hierarchica l structure refines the subject/nonsubject distinction and allows more functiona l distinctions to emerge. Keenan and Comrie speculate that their hierarchy can be exte nded to other processes besides relative clause formation, and indeed Comri e (1975) applies the hierarchy in an analysis of grammatical functions in causat ive constructions. In fact, the Keenan-Comrie hierarchy closely mirrors the “rel ational hierarchy” of Relational Grammar, as given by Bell (1983), upon which much work in Relational Grammar is based: (3) Relational Hierarchy of Relational Grammar: 1 (SUBJ) > 2 (OBJ) > 3 (indirect object ) The Obliqueness Hierarchy of Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar (Pollard and Sag 1994) also reflects a hierarchy of grammatical functi o s l ke this one. As demonstrated by a large body of work in Relational Grammar, H PSG, LFG, and other theories, the distinctions inherent in these hierarc hies are relevant across languages with widely differing constituent structure rep resentations, languages that encode grammatical functions by morphological as well as configurational means. There is a clear and well-defined similarity across la ngu ges at this abstract level. LFG assumes a universally available inventory of grammatic al functions: (4) Lexical Functional Grammar: SUBJect,OBJect,OBJθ, COMP, XCOMP, OBLiqueθ, ADJunct,XADJunct The labelsOBJθ and OBLθ represent families of relations indexed by semantic roles, with theθ subscript representing the semantic role associated with t he ar1The nomenclature that Keenan and Comrie use is slightly diff erent from that used in this book: in their terminology,DO is the direct object, which we call OBJ; IO is the indirect object;OBL is an oblique noun phrase; GEN is a genitive/possessor of an argument; and OCOMP is an object of comparison. 10 2. Functional Structure gument. For instance, OBJTHEME is the member of the group of thematically restrictedOBJθ functions that bears the semantic role THEME, andOBLSOURCE and OBLGOAL are members of theOBLθ group of grammatical functions filling the SOURCEandGOAL semantic roles. Grammatical functions can be cross-classified in several di fferent ways. The governable grammatical functions SUBJ, OBJ, OBJθ, COMP, XCOMP, andOBLθ can besubcategorized , or required, by a predicate; these contrast with modifying adjunctsADJ andXADJ, which are not subcategorizable. The governable grammatical functions form several natural groups. First, one can distinguish thecore argumentsor terms(SUBJ, OBJ, and the family of thematically restricted objects OBJθ) from the family ofnontermor obliquefunctions OBLθ. Crosslinguistically, term functions behave differently from nonterms in constructions involving anaphoric binding (Chapter 11) an d control (Chapter 12); we will discuss other differences between terms and nonterm s in Section 1.3 of this chapter. Second,SUBJ and the primary object function OBJ are thesemantically unrestricted functions, whileOBLθ and the secondary object function OBJθ are restricted to particular thematic or semantic roles, as the θ in their name indicates. Arguments with no semantic content, like the subject it of a sentence likeIt rained, can fill the semantically unrestricted functions, while th is is impossible for the semantically restricted functions. We will discuss thi distinction in Section 1.4 of this chapter. Finally, opengrammatical functions ( XCOMP andXADJ), whose subject is controlled by an argument external to the function, are disting u shed fromclosed functions. These will be discussed in Section 1.7 of this cha pter. Some linguists have considered inputs and outputs of relati on-changing rules like passive to be good tests for grammatical functionhood: f r example, an argument is classified as an object in an active sentence if it ap pe rs as a subject in the corresponding passive sentence, under the assumptio n that the passive rule turns an object into a passive subject. However, as we will di scuss in Chapter 8, grammatical function alternations like passive are best vi ewed not in terms of transformational rules, or even in terms of lexical rules ma nipulating grammatical function assignment, but as alternative means of linking gr ammatical functions to semantic arguments. Therefore, appeal to these processe s a viable diagnostics of grammatical functions requires a thorough understa nding of the theory of argument linking, and these diagnostics must be used with ca re. In the following, we present the inventory of grammatical fu nctions assumed in LFG theory and discuss a variety of grammatical phenomena that make reference to these functions. Some of these phenomena are sensiti ve to a grammatical hierarchy, while others can refer either to specific grammat ical functions or to the members of a larger class of functions. Thus, the same test (f or example, relativizability) might distinguish subjects from all other g ammatical functions in Functional Information and Functional Structure 11 one language, but might pick out both subjects and objects in another language. A number of tests are also specific to particular languages or to particular types of languages: for example, switch-reference constructions, constructions in which a verb is inflected according to whether its subject is corefer ential with the subject of another verb, do not constitute a test for subjecthood in a language in which switch-reference plays no grammatical role. In a theory lik e LFG, grammatical functions are theoretical primitives, not defined in phr asal or semantic terms; therefore, we do not define grammatical functions in terms of a particular, invariant set of syntactic behaviors. Instead, grammatical p henomena can be seen to cluster and distribute according to the grammatical orga nization provided by functional roles. 1.2. Governable Grammatical Functions and Modifiers A major division in grammatical functions distinguishes ar guments of a predicate from modifiers. The arguments are the governable grammatical functions of LFG; they are subcategorized for, or governed, by the predicate. Modifiers modify the phrase with which they appear, but they are not govern ed by the predicate. (5) Governable grammatical functions: SUBJ OBJ XCOMP COMP OBJ θ OBLθ } {{ } ADJ XADJ } {{ } GOVERNABLE GRAMMATICAL FUNCTIONS MODIFIERS Linguists have proposed a number of identifying criteria fo r g vernable grammatical functions. Dowty (1982) proposes two tests to disti ngu sh between go