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Morphological and syntactic issues have received relatively little attention in Functional Grammar, due to the fact that this grammatical model, given its functional orientation, was primarily concerned with developing its pragmatic and semantic components. Now that these have been solidly developed, this book turns to the further development of the syntactic and morphological components of the model.
Two recent developments receive pride of place: Bakker's Dynamic Expression Model and Hengeveld and Mackenzie's Functional Discourse Grammar. The first model aims at accounting for the complex interactions that one finds in many languages between the sets of expression rules that have to account for form on the one hand and those that establish order on the other. The second model takes a further step by considering morphosyntactic and phonological representations to be part of the underlying structure of the grammar rather than as the output of that grammar, contrary to the original assumptions in FG.
The book accordingly contains synopses of these two proposals as well as applications of these to a variety of linguistic phenomena. Further articles provide detailed analyses of a range of semantic and pragmatic categories and their morphosyntactic expression in a wide variety of languages. The articles in this book contain data on some 60 different languages, including focused articles on phenomena in Arabic, Danish, English, Lengua de Señas Española, Mapudungun, Plains Cree, and Tanggu.
In all, the contributions to this volume show that the issue of morphosyntactic expression in Functional Grammar is very much alive and moving into promising new directions, while at the same time contributing to a better understanding of a large number of morphosyntactic phenomena in a wide variety of languages.
List of contents
Agreement: More arguments for the dynamic expression model Dik Bakker
Constituent ordering in the expression component of Functional Grammar John H. Connolly
Dynamic expression in Functional Discourse Grammar Kees Hengeveld
Noun incorporation in Functional Discourse Grammar Niels Smit
Morphosyntactic templates Casper de Groot
A cross-linguistic study of so-called 'locative inversion': Evidence for the Functional Discourse Grammar model Francis Cornish
The agreement cross-reference continuum: Person marking in FG Anna Siewierska and Dik Bakker
The explanatory power of typological hierarchies: Developmental perspectives on non-verbal predication Eva H. van Lier
Non-verbal predicability and copula support rule in Spanish Sign Language Ángel Herrero-Blanco and Ventura Salazar-García
A new view on the semantics and pragmatics of operators of aspect, tense and, quantification Annerieke Boland
Exclamation: Sentence type, illocution or modality? Ahmed Moutaouakil
Close appositions Evelien Keizer
Inversion and the absence of grammatical relations in Plains Cree Arok Wolvengrey
Direction diathesis and obviation in Functional Grammar: The case of the inverse in Mapudungun, an indigenous language of south central Chile Ole Nedergaard Thomsen
Unexpected insertion or omission of an absolutive marker as an icon of a surprising turn of events in discourse Johan Lotterman and J. Lachlan Mackenzie
Pronominal expression rule ordering in Danish and the question of a discourse grammar Lisbeth Falster Jakobsen
About the author
Casper de Groot is Senior Lecturer at the Department of Theoretical Linguistics, University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands. Kees Hengeveld is Professor at the Department of Theoretical Linguistics, University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands.
Report
"If the editors of the Functional Grammar Series intended it to go out with a bang, they have certainly succeeded. This is a very valuable collection of papers that contributes both to the development of the theory into one that truly takes discourse into account, as well as to the understanding of problematic phenomena in a variety of languages. Linguists already working within F(D)G or in other functionally oriented frameworks will find much to inspire them in this book."
Inge Genee in: Linguistlist 16.3450/2005
