A lexical rule is in a form of syntactic rule used within many theories of natural language syntax.

These
rules alter the argument structures of lexical items (for example verbs and declensions) in order to alter
their combinatory properties.

Lexical rules affect in particular specific word classes and morphemes. Moreover, they may have
exceptions, do not apply across word boundaries and can only apply to underlying forms.

An example of a lexical rule in spoken English is the deletion of /n/. This rule applies in damn and
autumn, but not in hymnal. Because the rule of n-deletion apparently needs information about the
grammatical status of the word, it can only be lexical.

Lexical rules are a mechanism to reduce stipulation and redundancy and to capture generalizations in the
lexicon. The lexicon lists basic lexical entries in the form of a lexical sequence whose second member is
of type lexeme. Lexical rules relate these lexemes to the different words that can be derived from the
lexemes, for example they relate a verb lexeme to its different inflectional forms. The output of the
lexical rules are words which can be used to build syntactic structures.

Lexical Rules are modeled as feature structures of type lexical-rule (l-rule), which specify values for the
features INPUT and OUTPUT. There are three subtypes of lexical rules: inflectional-rule (i-rule),
derivational-rule (d-rule) and postinflectional-rule (pi-rule). The following list gives an overview of the
properties of these rules:

derivational rule:

of type d-rule

relates lexemes to lexemes

may change the syntactic category (e.g., drive (verb) -> driver (noun))

may change the ARG-ST (e.g., active verb -> passive verb)

may change the valence (as consequence of changing ARG-ST)

may change the index (e.g., drive (index: situation) -> driver (index: driver-argument of the situation))

may add predications to the RESTR list, but not remove any

for example, Present Participle L.R. (Lexical Rule), Past Participle L.R., Passive L.R., Agent Nominalization
L.R.

inflectional rule:

relates lexemes to words

of type i-rule

does not change the syntactic category

does not change the ARG-ST

does not change valence

does not change the INDEX

may add predications to the RESTR list, but not remove any

for example, Singular Noun L.R., Plural Noun L.R., 3rd-Singular Verb L.R., Non-3rd-Singular Verb L.R., Past-
Tense Verb L.R., Base Form L.R., Constant Lexeme L.R.

post-inflectional rule:

relates words to words

for example, Inversion L.R., Extraposition L.R.

Constant Lexeme Lexical Rule

The Constant Lexeme Lexical Rule is a lexical rule for noninflecting lexemes. It applies to lexemes of type
const-lxm and, consequently, to all of its subtypes. The rule is special in that it does nothing except
license requisite words from homophonous lexemes. The SYN, SEM and ARG-ST values are not changed.
The OUTPUTs of this rule are words and thus subject to the Argument Realization Principle. The
formalization of the Constant Lexeme Lexical Rule is given below: