This volume presents a collection of papers using the theory of Functional Discourse Grammar (FDG) to analyse and explain a number of specific constructions or phenomena (external possessor contructions and binominal constructions, negation, modification, modality, polysynthesis and transparency)… read more
This book provides ten case studies in Functional Discourse Grammar (FDG), a typologically-oriented theory of the organization of natural languages that has risen to prominence in recent years. The authors, all committed practitioners of FDG, include Kees Hengeveld, the intellectual father of the… read more
Edited by Hella Olbertz, Kees Hengeveld and Jesús Sánchez García
The papers collected in this volume concern five different aspects of the role of the lexicon in the theory of Functional Grammar such as developed by Simon C. Dik and his co-workers. The volume starts off with an eminently practical section on the Functional-Lexematic Model, a lexicological and… read more
This chapter presents typological generalizations that can be derived from a comparison of the data presented in Chapters 2–11 in this volume. The languages are compared in the light of the two predictions presented in Chapter 1: (i) across and within languages, dedicated habitual expressions… read more
This chapter discusses the Spanish infinitival auxiliary constructions with soler and acostumbrar (a) from a Functional Discourse Grammar perspective. A preliminary description leads to hypotheses on their semantics: both constructions are expected to apply to Episodes, States-of-Affairs and… read more
This aim of this chapter is to prove the linguistic reality of the distinction between objective and subjective epistemic modality as made in FDG, according to which the former modifies the Episode and the latter the Propositional Content. The chapter studies the two basic Spanish modal auxiliaries… read more
The theory of FDG claims that deontic modality can be either participant-oriented or event-oriented, both distinctions forming part of the Representational Level. However, there is evidence from Spanish and a number of other languages that event-oriented deontic modality can be coded twice, with… read more
The benefactive construction dar + gerund is used in the North Andean region only and is unknown elsewhere in the Spanish-speaking world. Based on the analysis of spontaneous data from Ecuadorian Highland Spanish, this paper provides a linguististic description of dar + gerund and of the social and… read more