Lexical Functional Grammar as a Construction Grammar

Lexical Functional Grammar (LFG) is a lexicalist, constraint-basedgrammatical theory that shares a lot of the basic assumptions of Con-struction Grammar (CxG), such as a commitment to surface-orienteddescriptions (no transformations), and the simultaneous representa-tion of form, meaning, and other grammatical information (no deriva-tions). Nevertheless, LFG is not standardly viewed as a kind of CxG,in particular since its adherence to the principle of Lexical Integritymeans that it insists on a strict morphology-syntax distinction whereCxG canonically rejects such a divide. However, such a distinction isin fact entirely compatible with CxG assumptions; the actual problemwith viewing LFG as a CxG is the difficulty it has in describing themore substantive end of the schematic-substantive spectrum of con-structions. I suggest that by replacing the limited context-free gram-mar base of LFG responsible for this shortcoming with a more expres-sive formalism (in this case a description-based tree-adjoining gram-mar), we can obtain a fully constructional LFG, suitable as a formalframework for CxG.