This paper aims at highlighting the syntactic and semantic variation of the Swedish verb "lata" "let" from both a synchronic and diachronic point of view. On the basis of corpus data containing Old and Modern Swedish texts from the 13th to the 19th centuries, the syntactic and semantic development of the verb is investigated within the framework…

An essential task for the morphosyntactic level within the grammatical component of Functional Discourse Grammar (FDG) is the handling of constituent ordering. This area of grammar, which is known as positional syntax, constitutes the subject of the present paper, in which the ordering of constituents is examined within the framework of a dynamic…

The aim of this paper is to compare the treatment of syntactic functions, and more particularly those traditionally labelled as Subject and Object, in Functional Discourse Grammar and Role and Reference Grammar. Relevant aspects of the overall structure of the two theories are briefly described. The concept of alignment between levels of the…

The aim of this paper is to challenge the generally accepted claim in descriptive and theoretical linguistics that English anaphoric proforms replace constituents (semantic or syntactic units) in underlying representation. On the basis of authentic examples, it is shown that the anaphoric use of the predicative proforms "one" and "do so", the…

Functional Discourse Grammar (FDG), as a theory of the organization of natural languages, seeks to attain pragmatic, typological and cognitive adequacy. The attempt to achieve cognitive adequacy has been fraught with problems stemming from the vagueness of the concept and the difficulty of adapting to trends in psycholinguistics. Specifically,…

This epilogue addresses the most important topics and challenges for the Morphosyntactic Level in Functional Discourse Grammar that have been raised in the articles in this Special Issue. We begin by exploring the differences between the Morphosyntactic Level in FDG and the treatment of morphosyntactic phenomena in other linguistic frameworks. We…

Standard criticisms of unjustified grammaticality assignments in generative syntax are easily countered by reminders that grammaticality is a different notion from acceptability. In response, the criticisms are reformulated here in a way that interprets unjustified assignments as possible evidence of the predictive failure of current generative…

Drawing on naturally-occurring data extracted from the British National Corpus (BNC) and the Corpus de Referencia del Espanol Actual (CREA) in conjunction with data elicited from native speakers by means of questionnaires, this paper provides a bottom-up, usage-based analysis of instances of depictive secondary predicates involving mainly verba…

In this paper, I examine the prosodic nature of unstressed function words in Spanish. I defend the hypothesis that these words, like all other words in the language, have a syllable that is lexically designated as stressed. I suggest that the essential property of these words is that they are subject to a rule of prosodic merger with following…

One fundamental difference between spoken and written language has to do with the "linearity" of speaking in time, in that the temporal structure of speaking is inherently the outcome of an interactive process between speaker and listener. But despite the status of "linearity" as one of Saussure's fundamental principles, in practice little more…

Studies on complementation in English and other languages have traditionally focused on syntactic issues, most notably on the constituent structures of different complement types. As a result, they have neglected the role of meaning in the choice of different complements. This paper investigates the semantics of complementation within the…

This study analyses a case of parallel grammaticalization in five genetically related languages, with a lexical source meaning "person" developing to a grammatical function of reflexive marking. Although not typologically unusual, this case is special because, in spite of the overall parallelism, the resulting reflexive markers are located in…

A survey of linguistic history to demonstrate the linguistic basis of logical and mathematical formalism is presented. (HP)

Some sociolinguistic considerations must enter directly into a complete generative grammatical analysis of Yoruba. Using Katz's conventional approach to grammatical description wherein syntax and semantics are separate would exclude a group of possible sentences. (POP)