Abstract

This paper investigates whether the fundamental linguistic insights and intuitions of Lexical Functional Grammar, which is usually presented as a constraint-based linguistic theory, can be reformulated in a resource sensitive framework using a substructural modal logic. In the approach investigated here, LFG's f-descriptions are replaced with expressions from a multi-modal propositional logic. In effect, the feature structure unification basis of LFG's f-structures is replaced with a very different resource based mechanism. It turns out that some linguistic analyses that required non-monotonic devices in LFG analysis of Icelandic) can be straightforwardly expressed in the framework presented here. Moreover, a Curry– Howard correspondence between proofs in this logic and -terms provides a semantic interpretation as a by-product of the process of showing syntactic well-formedness