Lexical-Functional Grammar.pptVIP

10/18/2006 Lexical-Functional Grammars Lexical-Functional Grammar A Formal System for Grammatical Representation Kaplan and Bresnan, 1982 Erin Fitzgerald NLP Reading Group October 18, 2006 LFG History Developed by J. Bresnan and R. Kaplan in early 1970’s Believed Chomskyan approach doesn’t model psychological reality of language Other motivations: Supported in wider variety of languages than other formalisms ex nonconfigurational languages with ~free word order/ case marks Movement paradoxes: That he was sick we talked about __ for days. *We talked about that he was sick for days. We talked about the fact that he was sick for days. How it’s different from Chomsky X’ Requires a higher level of mathematical precision Subject, Object, etc considered primitives, not defined from positions in tree Empty categories and funct. projections avoided No movement Unification-based Levels of representation not strictly derived from each other Not assumed that phonological, etc contents are derived from syntactic structure in any way. How it’s different from HPSG No hierarchical classification to deal with vertical and horizontal redundancy LFG focuses on the processing and psychological reality of language HPSG combines all syntactic, phonological, etc information into a single level Generative Power of LFG Not as powerful as general rewriting system or Turing Machine LF languages are context-sensitive But, greater generative capacity than CFG lower bound Allows anbncn, ωω non-CF languages Sources of generative power: Functional Composition: Helps encode range of tree properties Equality Predicate: Enforces a match between properties encoded from different nodes Correspondence Between Levels C onstituent -structure: varies across languages F unctional -structure: Universal properties Structures aren’t isomorphic, but related by different correspondences C-Structure Composed of Terminal strings Syntactic categories Dominance/precedence relations Expressed through phrase s