Verbless Clauses: Revealing the Structure within

Abstract

Although very frequent in their occurence across the world's languages, verbless constructions have received relatively little attention in the LFG literature (notable exceptions being Rosén (1996) and a brief discussion in Falk (2004)). In this paper we seek to redress this gap by providing a detailed analysis of verbless constructions in LFG. In particular, we show that the flexibility of the architecture of LFG allows for two possible analyses of these clause types, which we term the 'single-tier' and 'double-tier' analyses. Examination of the morphosyntactic properties of verbless clauses cross-linguistically provide support for these two different models of verbless constructions.