4. Joan Wanda
Bresnan
• Born on August 22, 1945
• Professor of Linguistics at
Standford University
• Ronald Kaplan’s partner
5. Ronald M. Kaplan
• Chief Scientist and a Principal
Researcher at the Powerset
division of Microsoft Bing
• Consulting Professor in the
Linguistics Department at
Stanford University and a
Principal of Stanford's Center
for the Study of Language and
Information (CSLI)
6. • Lexical Functional Grammar (LFG) was first
developed in the 1970’s by Joan Bresnan and Ron
Kaplan.
• They wanted to create a theory that could form the
basis of a realistic model for linguistic learnability
and language processing.
• Since LFG was found, the theory has been
applied to some new areas, such as morphology,
syntax and semantics theories.
8. Lexical Structure
The lexical entry includes information about
the meaning of the lexical item, its argument
structure, and the grammatical functions (e.g.,
subject, object, etc.) that are associated with
those arguments.
e.g. I hit you
9. The way to analyze sentence in
lexical structure by labelling
grammatical function.
Grammatical functions are
universal primitives within this
framework, and since they are
associated both with lexical
items and with syntactic
positions they mediate between
lexical and constituent
structure representations.
10. Constituent
Structure
C-Structure encodes linear
order, hierarchical
groupings, and syntactic
categories of constituents.
Notation of C-Structure
identifies the grammatical
functions that may occur in
specific syntactic positions.
11. Functional Structure
• Structural and lexical information is
integrated and unified within functional
structure (F-structure).
• When the lexical items that occupy the
terminal nodes of the tree are inserted into f-
structure, the information contained in the
lexical entry is retrieved and included in the f-
structure.
• It is in this way that lexical information is
combined with the structural information
available from the c-structure tree.
12. Mary Loves James
SUB PRED ‘Mary
NUM -PL
GEND +FEM
PERS 3rd
PRED ‘love’ (SUB) (OBJ)
TENSE -PAST
OBJ PRED ‘John’
NUM -PL
GEND -FEM
PERS 3rd