Discourse Functions
Several of the grammars use discourse functions such as TOPIC, FOCUS or GIV-TOP as part of the f-structure analysis.
This is generally done on purely syntactic grounds. The German grammar, for example, assigns TOPIC to the clause-initial constituent (this is not quite right and efforts had been on-going on determining better heuristics).
The Polish grammar has recently adopted the idea of an UDF (unbounded dependency function) for representing elements that are clearly playing some discourse functional role, but for which the role cannot be determined on the basis of syntax alone, but must be left to some further component that has more contextual (or other useful) information.
For theoretical background on UDFs see:
- Asudeh, Ash. 2012. The Logic of Prononimal Resumption. Oxford University Press.
- Asudeh, Ash. 2009. Adjacency and Locality: A Constraint-Based Analysis of Complementizer-Adjacent Extraction. LFG09 Proceedings. (http://web.stanford.edu/group/cslipublications/cslipublications/LFG/14/papers/lfg09asudeh.pdf)
- Alsina, Alex. 2008. A Theory of Structure-Sharing: Focusing on Long-Distance Dependencies and Parasitic Gaps. LFG08 Proceedings (http://web.stanford.edu/group/cslipublications/cslipublications/LFG/13/papers/lfg08alsina.pdf)
The LFG14 conference saw a special workshop on this topic. The papers presented are not part of the LFG proceedings but are scheduled to appear in a volume of collected papers.
For an argument why discourse functions should in principle not be represented as part of f-structure, see:
- King, Tracy Holloway. 1997. Focus Domains and Information Structure. LFG97 Proceedings. (http://web.stanford.edu/group/cslipublications/cslipublications/LFG/2/lfg97king.pdf)