Linguistics Encyclopedia.pdf

A-Z 385
principle of direct syntactic encoding. The correlations between c-structure
grammatical functions and the grammatical functions assigned to predicate-argument
structures are formally represented in functional structures (f-structures). The fstructure
for the c-structure given above is:
F-structures are semantically interpreted while c-structures are phonologically
interpreted. Because the grammatical relations of the predicates have already been
lexically encoded, it is very easy to interpret f-structures. F-structures represent
grammatical relations in a universal format which is independent of differences in surface
form (Bresnan and Kaplan, 1982, pp. xxvi–xxix. So (Bresnan, 1982, p. 16):
in the lexical theory of passivization, grammatical functions are universal
primitives which must be both lexically and syntactically encoded in each
language. The lexical encodings map the grammatical functions onto
thematic roles, or semantic predicate argu-ments, while the syntactic
encodings map the grammatical functions onto surface syntactic and
morphological structures. By formulating Passivization as a rule that
changes the lexical encoding of universal grammatical functions, the
lexical theory explains both its universal semantic effects…and its
variable syntactic manifestations…. For these reasons, the lexical theory
provides a more explanatory account of linguistic universals than
structuralist theories such as transformational grammar.
Horrocks (1987, p. 243) demonstrates how LFG handles nominalization. In the sentence
The cat assaulted the mouse, assault is a verb denoting a twoplace predicate with agent
and patient arguments assigned the grammatical roles, subject and object:
assault, V, ‘ASSAULT ’
AGENT PATIENT
However, assault can also be used in noun phrases like the cat’s assault on the mouse.
The noun phrase has the same predicate argument structure as the sentence in which
assault is a verb, a fact which is captured in the lexical entry for assault as a noun. Its
arguments’ grammatical roles differ, however (ibid.):
assault, N, ‘ASSAULT ’
AGENT PATIENT
Nominalization is very common, and it is captured in the redundancy rule (ibid.):