Functional Discourse Grammar A Typologically-Based Theory of Language Structure

This book is the first comprehensive presentation of Functional Discourse Grammar, a new and important theory of language structure. The authors set out its nature and origins and show how it relates to contemporary linguistic theory. They demonstrate and test its explanatory power and descriptive utility against linguistic facts from over 150 languages across a wide range of linguistic families. After a full introduction the book is divided into chapters concerned with the four levels of grammatical representation - pragmatic, semantic, morphosyntactic, and phonological - each of which has its own hierarchical structure. Functional Discourse Grammar offers a thorough account of how the use and meaning of language influence linguistic form by conditioning two levels of formulation which feed into two levels of encoding, all with their own specific characteristics. The book offers an ideal introduction to the theory and its applications in typology and description for scholars in linguistics and related fields from graduate students upwards.

Kees Hengeveld has been active in Functional Grammar for over twenty years. He is the author of Non-verbal Predication: theory, typology, diachrony (Berlin, 1992) and editor of Simon Dik's two-volume The Theory of Functional Grammar (Berlin, 1997). He is Professor of Theoretical Linguistics at the University of Amsterdam.

J. Lachlan Mackenzie has worked with Functional Grammar since his appointment in 1977 to the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, where he is now Honorary Professor of Functional Linguistics. He is co-editor of Crucial Readings in Functional Grammar and of A New Architecture for Functional Grammar (Berlin, 2004 and 2005).