122225 SE Linguistics Seminar / MA historical & descriptive linguistics (2013W)

In the generative approaches to language developed during the 1960s and 1970s, syntax was seen as the core component of the human language faculty, operating independently from semantics (meaning) and pragmatics (context). During the 1980s alternative approaches to language were proposed, which regarded language first and foremost as a form of social interaction in which all the various grammatical components (morphology, syntax, semantics and pragmatics) were taken to interact in the production and interpretation of utterances. One of the exponents of this functional-communicative paradigm is Functional Discourse Grammar (Hengeveld and Mackenzie 2008), which has the following distinctive features:
- It has a top-down organization starting with the formulation of the speaker's intention and then working its way down to articulation.
- It takes the Discourse Act as its basic unit of analysis. As such, FDG can accommodate regular clauses, as well as units larger than the clause (e.g. sequences of sentences), and units smaller than the clause (fully grammatical clause fragments, phrases or words).
- It analyses Discourse Acts in terms of independent pragmatic, semantic, morphosyntactic and phonological modules, which interact to produce the appropriate linguistic forms.
- FDG systematically interacts with a conceptual, a contextual and an output component.

During the course, the theory of Functional Discourse Grammar will be applied to English with the aim of providing new analyses of such important linguistic phenomena as illocution, reference and predication, modification and modality, pragmatic functions, word order phenomena, the position of the lexicon and the lexical-grammatical distinction.