Lexical-Functional Grammar: A Formal System for Grammatical Representation

In learning their native language, children develop a remarkable set of capabilities. They acquire knowledge and skills that enable them to produce and comprehend an indefinite number of novel utterances, and to make quite subtle judgments about certain of their properties. The major goal of psycholinguistic research is to devise an explanatory account of the mental operations that underlie these linguistic abilities. In pursuing this goal, we have adopted what we call the Competence Hypothesis as a methodological principle. We assume that an explanatory model of human language performance will incorporate a theoretically justi ed representation of the native speaker's linguistic knowledge (a grammar) as a component separate both from the computational mechanisms that operate on it (a processor) and from other nongrammatical processing parameters that might influence the processor's behavior. To a certain extent the various components that we postulate can be studied independently, guided where appropriate by the well-established methods and evaluation standards of linguistics, computer science, and experimental psychology. However, the requirement that the various components ultimately must fit together in a consistent and coherent model imposes even stronger constraints on their structure and operation.