Constructions with Lexical Integrity: Templates as the Lexicon-Syntax Interface

LFG differs from Construction Grammar (CG) in assuming a strict separation between the lexicon and the syntax. The LFG architecture and the principle of Lexical Integrity dictate that fully inflected words are “inserted” one by one into the c-structure, which does not seem to permit the blurring of the boundary between words and larger syntactic units that CG advocates. This paper addresses the question of how the intuitions behind constructions (in the CG sense) can be formalized within LFG, without rejection of the foundational assumptions behind the LFG framework. The key insight in our approach is the use of LFG templates (Dalrymple et al. 2004, Crouch et al. 2008) to factor out grammatical information in such a way that it can be invoked either by lexical items or by specific c-structure rules. C- structure rules that invoke specific templates are thus the equivalent of constructions in our approach, but Lexical Integrity and the separation of lexicon and syntax are preserved.