Beyond c-structure and f-structure: Linguistic representations and relations

Abstract

In the first part of the book, there was an examination of the two levels of syntactic structure: f-structure and c-structure. Besides these two syntactic structures, LFG research has explored other linguistic levels and their representations. In considering the overall architecture of our theory of grammar, the following questions must be addressed: How do we determine when it is necessary to postulate the existence of a new linguistic level, distinct from those already assumed within the theory? How do we determine the best representation for a proposed level of structure? And how can constraints within a level, or constraints that hold across levels, be defined within this architecture? Our theory must respect modularity and the independence of different levels of linguistic structure, while stating the relations among levels in a clear, easily understandable way. This chapter addresses these issues, and introduces the projection architecture as a piece-wise correspondence between levels of grammatical representation.