Features as Resources in R-LFG

This paper describes a new formalization of Lexical-Functional Grammar called R-LFG (where the “R” stands for “Resource-based”). The formal details of R-LFG are presented in Johnson (1997); the present work concentrates on motivating R-LFG and explaining to linguists how it differs from the “classical” LFG framework presented in Kaplan and Bresnan (1982). This work is largely a reaction to the linear logic semantics for LFG developed by Dalrymple and colleagues (Dalrymple et al., 1995; Dalrymple et al., 1996a; Dalrymple et al., 1996b; Dalrymple et al., 1996c). As they note, LFG’s f-structure completeness and coherence constraints fall out as a by-product of the linear logic machinery they propose for semantic interpretation, thus making those f-structure mechanisms redundant. Given that linear logic machinery or something like it is independently needed for semantic interpretation, it seems reasonable to explore the extent to which it is capable of handling feature structure constraints as well. R-LFG represents the extreme position that all linguistically required feature structure dependencies can be captured by the resource-accounting machinery of a linear or similiar logic independently needed for semantic interpretation. The goal is to show that LFG linguistic analyses can be expressed as clearly and perspicuously using the smaller set of mechanisms of R-LFG as they can using the much larger set of mechanisms in LFG: if this is the case thenwe will have shown that positing these extra f-structure mechanisms are not linguistically warranted. One way to show this would be to present a translation procedure which reduces LFGs to equivalent RLFGs, but currently no such procedure is known. Thus we proceed on a