Lexical functional grammar

Book section

Lexical Functional Grammar (LFG) is a linguistic theory which studies the various facets of linguistic structure and the relations between them. Traditional LFG analyses focus on two syntactic structures. Constituent structure (c-structure) represents word order and phrasal groupings, and functional structure (f-structure) represents grammatical functions like subject and object. These structures have separate representations, but are related to each other in systematic ways. Recent LFG work includes investigations of prosodic structure, semantic structure, and other linguistic structures and their relation to c-structure and f-structure.

Authors: Toivonen, I; Dalrymple, M

• Publication status: In press
• Peer review status: Peer reviewed
• Publisher: Elsevier
• Host title: Reference Module in Social Sciences
• Publication date: 2026-04-17
• DOI: 10.1016/B978-0-323-95504-1.01635-5
• EISBN: 9780443157851
• Language: English
• Keywords: linguistic architecture; completeness; c-structure; functional structure; open/closed grammatical function; constituent structure; annotated phrase structure rule; Glue semantics; f-structure; mapping theory; coherence