Syntax and Morphology of Tense in Lfg

We look at a contrasting picture where some piece of functional/semantic information, namely tense, may be deened morphologically by tense innection, or else compositionally in syntax (in conjunction with innection on syntactic items). The question that is at issue is how to represent analytic tense formation to obtain a uniform functional structure for analytic and synthetic tense formation. Several approaches have been proposed, which we brieey review, in particular two proposals which posit a new level of grammatical representation, morphological/morpho-syntactic (m-)structure, which represents morphosyntactic information in an attribute-value structure. It has been shown that this move can solve the problem of how to represent analytic and synthetic tense formation in a uniform way in f-structure (see Butt et al (1996) and Frank and Zaenen (1998,2000)). However, by positing a novel level of representation, m-structure, these proposals raise fundamental questions and issues. Which are the criteria for the conceptual division between functional-syntactic and morpho-syntactic features? Is the particular way we set up the projection architecture compatible with data and phenomena that involve morphological processes in a variety of languages? Is an avm structure an appropriate representation format for morphological information (and processes)? Which kinds of morphological information/processes do we want to represent in this way? What about lexical integrity in such a scenario? 1 Synthetic and Analytic Tense Formation Synthetic and analytic tense formation may contribute the same funtional/semantic information to f-structure: e.g. French parla (pass e simple), a parl e (pass e compos e). (1) a. Il parla. b. Il a parl e. Variation in synthetic vs. analytic tense formation also occurs across languages: e.g. synthetic future in French tournera vs. analytic future in German wird drehen and English will turn. (2) a. The driver will turn the lever. b. Der Fahrer wird den Hebel drehen. c. Le conducteur tournera le levier.