Minimal phrase structure : a new formalized theory of phrase structure

X´ theory was a major milestone in the history of the development of generative grammar.1 It enabled important insights to be made into the phrase structure of human language, but it had a number of weaknesses, and has been essentially replaced in Chomskyan generativism by Bare Phrase Structure (BPS), which assumes fewer theoretical primitives than X´ theory, and also avoids several of the latter’s weaknesses. However, Bare Phrase Structure has not been widely adopted outside the Minimalist Program (MP), rather, X´ theory remains widespread. In this paper, we develop a new, fully formalized approach to phrase structure which incorporates insights and advances from BPS, but does not require the Minimalist-specific assumptions that come with BPS. We formulate our proposal within Lexical-Functional Grammar (LFG), providing an empirically and theoretically superior model for phrase structure compared with standard versions of X´ theory current in LFG.