Lexical-functional Syntax: (Blackwell Textbooks in Linguistics S.)

Lexical-Functional Syntax is the definitive text for Lexical-Functional Grammar in the field of syntax. Complete with integrated pedagogy and problem sets to support the text, this book provides an accessible, empirically motivated treatment of the mathematical architecture of LFG. It also covers the theoretical linguistic ideas that LFG can model, and discusses the wide range of crosslinguistic syntactic phenomena to which it has been applied.The volume is essential to students and researchers who wish to look outside the Chomskyan framework for syntax. It shows why the Chomskyan formal architecture of structural transformations is less attractive for certain types of syntactic phenomena than an architecture of imperfect correspondences between parallel information structures. The book also illustrates how the best ideas from the transformational framework can be captured in a natural way. It gives a clear introduction to the fundamentals of a feature-logic based framework for syntax and provides extensive discussion of crosslinguistic applications, of particular interest to practitioners of feature-logic based approaches such as HPSG and Categorical Unification Grammar.

Table of Contents:
Acknowledgements. Prologue. Part I: On the Architecture of Universal Grammar:. 1. Nonconfigurationality. 2. Movement Paradoxes. 3. Lexicality and Argument Structure. Part II: Formally Modelling the Architecture:. 4. A Formal Model of Syntactic Structure. 5. Monotonicity and Some of Its Consequences. Part III: Inflectional Morphology and Phrase Structure Variation:. 6. A Theory of Structure-Function Mappings. 7. Endocentricity and Heads. 8. Pronoun Incorporation and Agreement. 9. Topicalization and Scrambling. Part IV: On Functional Structures: Binding, Predication, and Control:. 10. Basic Binding Theory. 11. Types of Bound anaphors. 12. Predication Relations. 13. Anaphoric Control. 14. From Argument Structure to Functional Structure. Problem Sets and Solutions. References. Index.

About the Author :
Joan Bresnan is Sadie Dernham Patek Professor of Humanities and Professor of Linguistics at Stanford University and, formerly, at MIT. She is a past-president of the Linguistic Society of America and a member of the Executive Committee of the International Lexical-Functional Grammar Association. She is co-editor, with Alex Alsina and Peter Sells, of Complex Predicates (1997).

Review :
"This is a clear, user-friendly, and authoritative presentation of LFG by one its principal architects. Readers of all kinds - neophytes, LFG-insiders, and aficionados of other models - will find much to enthuse and entertain them. This is a major contribution to the theoretical syntactic literature." Nigel Vincent, University of Manchester "This is a very important book. Bresnan combines her famously lucid prose style, her unobtrusive erudition, and a penetrating grasp of the issues to provide an overview of LFG that will be greatly welcomed by advanced student and researcher alike. The remarkable empirical and theoretical breadth of the work make this essential reading for all serious students of syntax and morphosyntax, regardless of their theoretical persuasion." Andrew Spencer, University of Essex