Constituent structure

Abstract

AbstractThis chapter examines the organization of overt phrasal syntactic representation, the constituent structure or c-structure. Section 3.1 discusses some traditional arguments for constituent structure representation. Many of these arguments prove to be flawed, since the theory of phrase structure has a different status in LFG than in theories in which grammatical functions are defined configurationally and abstract syntactic (and other) relations are represented in phrase structure terms. Valid criteria within LFG for phrase structure determination are proposed in Section 3.2. The inventory of constituent structure categories, both lexical and functional, that are crosslinguistically available and the theory of the organization of words and categories into phrases are explored in Section 3.3. The general theory of constituent structure organization is exemplified in Section 3.4, where we provide more specific discussion of the constituent structure organization of clauses. Section 3.5 discusses the relation between hierarchical constituent structure and surface linear order.