Extending the Applicability of Lexical Mapping Theory

Abstract

LFG grants syntactic functions a central role and has developed a theory of argument structure, Lexical Mapping Theory (LMT), which is independent of phrase-structure trees and thus able to account for morpholexical derivations. Yet some fundamental phenomena falling within the scope of morpholexical analysis – such as morphosemantic (meaning-altering) operations, phenomena referred to \nelsewhere as ‘demotions’, or subjectlessness –are currently denied satisfactory LMT accounts. This paper offers a way of extending LMT to phenomena which are awkward or impossible to handle with the current widely accepted versions of LMT. \n \n While retaining the main component of LMT – the feature decomposition of syntactic functions – I suggest the following set of revisions: (1) restoring the early LFG distinction between argument positions and semantic roles; (2) allowing the semantic participants to change order and re-associate with different argument positions for non-default (morphosemantically altered) mappings; (3) fixing the order of (syntactic) argument positions; (4) reformulating the principles of \nargument-to-function mapping to make fuller use of the markedness hierarchy of \nsyntactic functions and render the Subject Condition redundant; and (5) using a \nmechanism of increasing markedness to account for morphosyntactic operations \nreferred to as ‘demotions’ in RG. I demonstrate that these revisions make LMT a cleaner formalism which is immediately applicable to some important phenomena that have so far escaped (good) analyses.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 69 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.