5. Lexical Functional Grammar

Lexical Functional Grammar is a linguistic theory which explores the various aspects of linguistic structure and how they are related. Like HPSG (Müller and Machicao y Priemer, 2018), Construction Grammar (Chaves, 2018), and the Parallel Architecture (Jackendoff and Audring, 2018), it is constraint-based and declarative, and does not assume that processes such as transformations are a part of linguistic theory. It was developed in the late 1970s by Joan Bresnan and Ron Kaplan as a theory of syntax, but has since been augmented by theories of other modules of linguistic structure and their relations to one another, including semantics and the syntax-semantics interface, argument structure, information structure, morphology, and prosody. These levels of structure are represented by separate grammatical modules which may be of very different formal character, connected to one another by means of functions relating parts of one structure to its corresponding parts in another structure.