120086 AR MA Adv. Course Ling. 1-5 (Historical / Adv. / Appl. & TEFL) = Adv. Course in English Ling. (225) (2011S)

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 was Dik's Functional Grammar (FG), which has recently been succeeded by 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. Although still primarily a semantically and pragmatically oriented theory of grammar, FDG thus aims at being comprehensive in dealing with all levels of grammatical organization.

- FDG systematically interacts with a conceptual, a contextual and an output component.

FDG is also characterized by a formalist approach: linguistic expressions are provided with detailed underlying representations at each of the four levels.
During the course, we will consider a number of important aspects of the theory, such as illocution, reference and predication, pragmatic functions, prepositional constructions, pronominalization, the position of the lexicon and the lexical-grammatical distinction, to see how an application of the model to English can lead to new insights and analyses.