《句法映射理论:格的分配与语法功能的实现》 deals with some of the fundamental issues in syntax, in all formal frameworks, and particularly in the formal framework of Lexical-Functional Grammar (LFG): how the argument roles of a verb correspond to grammatical functions such as subject or object and how grammatical functions are expressed in terms of grammatical case such as nominative and accusative. The book takes a new perspective on the analysis of these phenomena which is shown to be very successful in providing adequate explanations.The basic assumptions of LFG are adopted and presented in a very clear way. In addition, the framework of Optimality Theory (OT) is incorporated into LFG yielding the framework of OT-LFG, following important work in this line, including much work by Joan Bresnan, one of the founders of LFG. In this framework, the system of syntactic representations is essentially that of classical LFG, but the way grammatical constraints interact with each other follows.A central goal of this work is developing a linking theory, or mapping theory, which will adequately account for the facts that a linking theory should account for, focusing on those facts that are problematic for existing theories. One of the salient innovations of Yang's proposal is making grammatical case play an important role in her linking theory. Previous theories within LFG had assumed that case played no role (or at least a very minor role) in the mapping between argument roles and grammatical functions. Structural cases like accusative and nominative were assumed to be predictable from grammatical functions; semantic and lexically inherent cases were assumed to be assigned independently of grammatical function, on the basis of semantic information or of lexical idiosyncrasies. But, in either situation, case did not play a role in predicting the mapping between argument roles and grammatical functions. In Yang's theory, case features are assigned to arguments and constrain the grammatical functions that can correspond to those arguments.