M-structure

M-structure was invented as a result of early discussions within ParGram on the best cross linguistically valid treatment of auxiliaries (see that page for more discussion). Within ParGram the use of m-structure was abandoned fairly quickly (but the analysis was still current at the time the Grammar Writer's Cookbook was written, see pages 60-67), but then abandoned it as too unwieldy (debugging becomes very difficult whenever several different projections from c-structure must be kept track of). Instead, the ParGram grammars now store information needed for language particular morphosyntactic wellformedness checking in a CHECK feature at f-strucutre.

Within theoretical LFG, m-structure took on a life of its own and current work continues to explore uses or ramifications of adding in this further projection, starting with Frank and Zaenen (1998). A workshop was organized on this topic at the LFG00 conference at Berkeley (http://www.stanford.edu/group/cslipublications/cslipublications/LFG/5/lfg00morphwrk.html) and a collection of papers on morphological issues can be found in Sadler and Spencer (2004).

References

Butt, Miriam, Tracy Holloway King, Niño, Frédérique Segond. 1999. "A Grammar Writer's Cookbook." CSLI Publications.

Frank, Anette and Annie Zaenen. 1998. Tense in LFG: Syntax and Morphology. Reprinted in L. Sadler and A. Spencer (eds.), "Projecting Morphology". CSLI Publications, Sadler, Lousa and Andrew Spencer (eds.). 2004. "Projecting Morphology". CSLI Publications.