A Functional Discourse Grammar for English

Abstract

This is the first textbook on Functional Discourse Grammar, a recently developed theory of language structure which analyses utterances at four independent levels of grammatical representation: pragmatic, semantic, morphosyntactic and phonological. The book offers a very systematic and highly accessible introduction to the theory: following the top-down organization of the model, it takes the reader step-by-step though the various levels of analysis (from pragmatics down to phonology), while at the same time providing a detailed account of the interaction between these different levels. The many exercises, categorized according to degree of difficulty, ensure that students are challenged to use the theory in a creative manner, and invite them to test and evaluate the theory by applying it to the new data in various linguistic contexts. Evelien Keizer uses examples from a variety of sources to demonstrate how the theory of Functional Discourse Grammar can be used to analyse and explain the most important functional and formal features of present-day English. The book also contains examples from a wide variety of other typologically diverse languages, making it attractive not only to students of English linguistics but to anyone interested in linguistic theory more generally.