Joan Bresnan

This is a textbook introduction to the Lexical-Functional Grammar (LFG) syntactic framework that would be accessible to any linguist with a general familiarity with syntactic theory. It introduces the formalism and shows how it can be applied to standard syntacitic phenomena such as binding and control. There is a relatively short set of problems at the back of the book—enough for a reader to check their own understanding, though probably not enough to base a class around. The exposition is clear. This is the best book I've seen for teaching yourself LFG.

Mary Dalrymple's Lexical-Functional Grammar is another good LFG book that covers much of the same terrain. Unlike Bresnan's book, it is not a textbook, so there are no problem sets, and there is a greater emphasis on describing the syntactic phenomena that motivated the creation of LFG.

An interesting companion would be Syntactic Theory: A Formal Introduction, a textbook about Head-Driven Phase Structure Grammar (HPSG). Though HPSG and LFG employ different formal mechanisms, they share many of the same design philosophies, so a comparison is illuminating.… (mais)