Adverbial conjunctions in Functional Discourse Grammar

This contribution presents a new view on the treatment of adverbial conjunctions in Functional Discourse Grammar, combining an analysis of general linguistic interest with a theoretically motivated one. It starts off with a typological classification of linguistic elements expressing relations between clauses, which leads to a classification of conjunctions and conjunctional phrases in English. Attention is then paid to the different lexical-grammatical properties of different types of conjunctional elements. The findings show that, in English, linguistic elements used to combine clauses form a continuum ranging from grammatical elements parallel to prepositions to lexical elements parallel to verb chain contructions. The descriptive tools of Functional Discourse Grammar help to reveal a correlation between the types of conjunction and their domain of application.