LFG of incorporating language

[Bruce Mayo]

paul.anderson at ibm.net wrote:
>I am an honours student of linguistics at UNE.  I am trying to find out if
>there has been any attempts at a LFG description of an incorporating
>language.  If you know of any papers written in this area I would very much
>apreciate you letting me know.
>How do you construct an F-structure for
>incorporating languages?  It strikes me that a 'word' is an important
>concept for the definition of a predicate.  Does LFG cope with a
>potentially dynamic lexicon?

Hi Paul,
        I think incorporation in syntax as described e.g. by Mark Baker is
not compatible with LFG, although you will surely want to find out what
others think. Many morphologists outside of LFG e.g. Steven Anderson have
argued that morphotactics is different from syntax and that grammatical
functions play no role in the relations among constituent morphemes of a
word.
        As for how to describe a "potentially dynamic lexicon", if you read
the Introduction to Bresnan 82 very carefully, you find that Bresnan &
Kaplan did have some good ideas about how spontaneously formed passives
would be handled. But these ideas have since sunk into obscurity. The
formalism now seems to assume a static lexicon, and LFG has been criticized
by many for this apparent inflexibility. Moreover, the LFG Grammar Writer's
Workbench does not provide a mechanism for analysing neologisms that would
include semantics and argument structure.
        In reality, a static lexicon is by no means a necessary consequence
of the LFG model. At the University of Konstanz we have developed a
computational model for LFG that does allow spontaneously introduced
derivatives (and thus, I suppose, incorporated arguments) to be processed
"on-line". The construction of the new word is described not as a synactic
operation but as one taking place in a separate processing module which is
responsible for operations like morphotactic analysis and argument mapping.
The same mechanisms ought to be usable for complex predicate formation, but
I have not thought this through. The main ideas are sketched in Mayo,
Schepping, Schwarze, Zaffanella, "Semantics in the derivational morphology
of Italian: implications for the structure of the lexicon", Linguistics
33:883-938.
        If this article seems helpful, I can send a longer research report
that describes the implementation and the theoretical background.
Greetings,


Bruce Mayo, FG Sprachwissenschaft
Universitaet Konstanz
Postfach 5560 D 177
D-78434 Konstanz
eMail:  bruce.mayo at uni-konstanz.de