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PE2379 ch04.qxd 24/1/02 16:05 Page 306<br />

lexical functional grammar<br />

system which shows their relationship to one another. For example, kinship<br />

terms such as father, mother, brother, sister, uncle, aunt belong to a<br />

lexical field whose relevant features include generation, sex, membership<br />

<strong>of</strong> the father’s or mother’s side <strong>of</strong> the family, etc.<br />

The absence <strong>of</strong> a word in a particular place in a lexical field <strong>of</strong> a language<br />

is called a lexical gap.<br />

For example, in English there is no singular noun that covers both cow<br />

and bull as horse covers stallion and mare.<br />

lexical functional grammar n<br />

also LFG<br />

a theory <strong>of</strong> grammar that holds that there are two parallel levels <strong>of</strong> syntactic<br />

representation: CONSTITUENT STRUCTURE (c-structure), consisting <strong>of</strong><br />

context-free phrase structure trees, and functional structure (f-structure),<br />

consisting <strong>of</strong> attributes such as tense and gender and functions such as<br />

subject and object. An important difference between LFG and the<br />

Chomskyan tradition from which it developed is that many phenomena<br />

that were treated as transformations in the Chomskyan tradition (for<br />

example, passive vs. active sentences) are treated in the LEXICON 3 in<br />

LFG.<br />

lexical gap n<br />

see LEXICAL FIELD<br />

lexical item n<br />

another term for LEXEME<br />

lexical meaning n<br />

see CONTENT WORD<br />

lexical phonology n<br />

a model <strong>of</strong> morphology and phonology and the lexicon in which the<br />

lexicon is divided into levels or strata. Phonological rules are divided<br />

into lexical rules, which are carried out in the lexicon and include<br />

morphological conditioning, and postlexical rules, which apply across<br />

word boundaries in a separate component order after the rules <strong>of</strong><br />

syntax.<br />

lexical phrases n<br />

recurrent phrases and patterns <strong>of</strong> language use which have become institutionalized<br />

through frequent use, such as “Have we met?” and “You<br />

must be joking”.<br />

306

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