Reducing grammatical functions in LFG

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to reexamine the rich repertoire of grammatical functions assumed in LFG and provide novel arguments for the claim, voiced earlier for example in Alsina et al. 2005, that most of them are redundant. We also demonstrate that a textbook LFG test for the sameness of grammatical functions of different predicates fails on closer scrutiny. Constructively, we propose a more constrained approach to grammatical functions, which, however, has the advantage of formalising the grammatical function hierarchy, assumed in LFG analyses of diverse phenomena but apparently not previously formalised.