Towards a More Lexical and Functional Type-Logical Theory of Grammar (original) (raw)

Type-Logical Lexical Functional Grammar is a new, radically lexicalist, and formally parsimonious theory, in essence a re-incarnation of Lexical Func- tional Grammar (Kaplan and Bresnan, 1982) in a type-logical formal frame- work very similar in formal nature to that of Type-Logical Categorial Gram- mar (Morrill, 1994; Moortgat, 1997). It puts emphasis on having a simple logical foundation as its formal basis and no empirically unmotivated primi- tives, representations, and mappings between them. It differs from TLCG in basing syntactic analyses on functional rather than constituent structure, to both LFG and TLCG in that it rejects syntactic categories as primitives, and to LFG in that it rejects c-structure as a linguistically significant representa- tion and in being radically lexicalist. The present paper presents TL-LFG, the sequence of developments that lead to it, and its key differences from LFG.