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(3)
(SUB)→(OBJAG)/ (OBJ)→(SUBJ)
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For other languages there would be an identical rule, except that the grammatical function
names might be different (Bresnan and Kaplan, 1982, pp. xxv–xxvi).
The descriptive power of this lexical rule equals that of the passive transformation of
Chomsky’s (1965) standard theory and move alpha of his government-binding theory
(1981). Both versions of Chomsky’s theory (see TRANSFORMATIONAL-
GENERATIVE GRAMMAR) represent both predicate-argument structures and the
surface forms of sentences as syntactic phrase structures, so that the mapping between
semantic arguments and surface forms must be expressed through operations on phrase
structures. As (1) and (2) above show, LFG does not posit a one-to-one correspondence
between semantic predicate-argument structure and grammatical functions (Chomsky’s
theta criterion: see TRANSFORMATIONAL-GENERATIVE GRAMMAR), and
grammatical functions are not considered reducible to deep phrase-structure
configurations. Rather, the phrase structure categories are considered to be universal,
functional primitives bearing many-to-many relationships—and different relationships
within different languages—to structural configurations. However, each mapping from
predicate argument to grammatical function must assign a unique function to each
predicate argument, and a unique predicate argument to each function which is associated
with a predicate argument (some functions are not associated with a predicate argument;
for example, an idiomatic object such as tabs in keep tabs on is a grammatical object
which does not correspond to an argument in predicate-argument structure—see Bresnan,
1982, p. 46); this condition is called the functionargument biuniqueness condition
(Bresnan, 1982, p. 5).
Since LFG does not require phrase-structure representations of predicate-argument
relations, the structural component of the grammar is very simple. The entire
transformational derivation is replaced by a single level of phrase structure which
represents the surface form of a language. This is called the constituent structure (cstructure).
The sentence Mary kissed John has the c-structure:
The c-structure is related to thematic-role structure by correlations between the
grammatical functions associated with c-structure and the grammatical functions that are
assigned to predicate-argument structure. Only lexical rules can alter the functionargument
associations; syntactic rules must preserve them. Since active and passive verbs
induce different grammatical relations, they must have different lexical entries. The
requirement that syntactic rules preserve function-argument associations is called the