Architectures, Rules, and Preferences reflects the interests and honors the
influence of Joan Bresnan's two decades of foundational work on
Lexical-Functional Grammar (LFG). This comprehensive volume includes
contributions by leading linguists on language typology, synchronic
variation, language change, constituent structure, function identification,
subject condition, control, complex predicates, NP internal structure,
wh-constructions, syntactic features, and lexical issues. Featuring an
impressive range of empirical and theoretical research, this collection
covers more than a dozen spoken languages as well as American Sign
Language.
Language typology and synchronic variation are addressed by Borjars,
Nordlinger, Sadler, Seiler, and Vincent. Language change is discussed by
Allen, Borjars, Butt, Ishikawa, and Vincent.
Several papers explore specific syntactic problems of constituent
structure, including NP internal structure (Allen, Yehuda Falk, Fassi
Fehri, Grimshaw, Seiler, and Vinet), function identification (Berman),
the subject condition (Alsina), control (Asudeh and Toivonen), complex
predicates (Ishikawa), traceless accounts of wh-constructions (Dalrymple,
Kaplan, and King) and syntactic features (Alvarez, Borjars, Frederking,
Good, Levin, and Vincent). Lexical issues are explored by Kroeger, Levin,
Peterson, and Rappoport Hovav.
Extensions of the parallel architecture of LFG to information
structure find an expression in work by Butt, Mchombo, Neidle, and Simpson.
Work in LFG incorporating insights from Optimality Theory (OT) is
found in Cho, Choi, Lee and Siaki, whereas Andrews shows how to
develop an OT-LFG with semantic interpretation. Jaeger and Maslova
consider the foundations of stochastic OT.
