Restriction and Verbal Complexes in LFG --- A Case Study for Danish

In current LFG auxiliaries are generally treated as functional categories lacking a predicate-value. Under this approach the morphosyntactic dependency between the auxiliary and the main verb cannot be stated. Instead alternative architecutures involving c- or f-structure-based morphological projections have been proposed to account for this dependency. In this paper we argue that both projection approaches are theoretically unsatisfactory, since amorphological projection seems to be called for in exactly those cases where the expression of a given morphosyntactic content is syntactic and not morphological. Instead, we propose to analyze verbal complexes without a morphological projection. We develop an approach based on the restriction operator (Kaplan and Wedekind:1993) where the morphosyntactic dependencies are checked in functional terms as dependencies between a c-structure head and an ungoverned dep function while the verbal complex (and consequently the sentence) is assigned a flat f-structure. This approach overcomes the problems inherent to the raising and projection approaches. The approach is illustrated for temporal auxiliaries, passives and modal constructions in Danish.