Monotonicity and the Theory of Relation Changes in LFG

Abstract

In the version of LFG presented in Bresnan (1982), relation-changing processes were viewed as redundancy relationships between lexical entries which allowed the syntactic part of the theory to have a strongly monotonic character. However, there are both empirical and substantive shortcomings with this approach to the lexicon. In this paper I outline these shortcomings, and then present a new theory of relation changes in LFG, often referred to as lexical mapping theory. Lexical mapping theory provides a theory of argument-structures, which mediate the mappings between semantic role in lexical relations and syntactic functions in f–structure. In the latter half of the paper I present the details and consequences of this theory, and also look at the principles constraining mappings that have been proposed in the recent literature.