Lexical Functional Grammar Levels of Representation in Certain Persian Syntactic Structures

Lexical Functional Gramma (LFG) is a non-transformational generative grammar, which excludes concepts such as deep structure, surface structure and transformation. Rather than shifting a deep structure into a surface form through transformations, LFG maintains the idea that several structures exist in parallel levels. The two main structures in the LFG are constituent structure and function structure, which are abbreviated as c-structure and f- structure, respectively. LFG is also comprised of other structures including argument structure, semantic structure, and information structure. The present paper mainly focuses on the f-structure to prove the capability of LFG in explaining some linguistic phenomena and characteristics of Persian language such as passivization, non-configurationality, and topicalization. Certain Persian structures such as simple and compound sentences, complement clauses, and genitive structures are studied and, following 10 grammatical roles are introduced for Persian Lodrup’s (2011) model, which are classified as argument vs. non-argument and discourse vs. non-discourse.