Functional structure

Abstract

Functional structure is the abstract functional syntactic organization of the sentence, familiar from traditional grammatical descriptions, representing syntactic predicate-argument structure and functional relations like subject and object. Section 2.1 presents motivation for the categories and information appearing in functional structure and outlines some common characteristics of functional structure categories. Section 2.2 demonstrates that grammatical functions are best treated as primitive concepts, as they are in LFG, rather than defined in terms of morphological or phrase structure concepts. Section 2.3 shows that syntactic subcategorization requirements, the array of syntactic arguments required by a predicate, are best stated in functional terms. The formal representation of functional structure (f-structure) and constraints on f-structure representations are discussed in Section 2.4. Finally, Section 2.5 provides an overview of the content and representation of f-structure features.