The Functional Discourse Grammar model has a twofold objective: on the one hand, to provide a descriptively, psychologically and pragmatically adequate account of the forms made available by a typologically diverse range of languages; and on the other, to provide a model of language which is set up to reflect, at one remove, certain of the stages…

Science classroom discourse is inherently multimodal in that scientific meanings are made through an integration of multiple semiotic systems (e.g., language, diagrams, equations). Although some studies have described this multimodal nature, few have examined and explained the relationship between the integration of multiple semiotic systems and…

Conversation Analysis (CA) and Discursive Psychology (DP) reject the view that assumptions about cognitive processes should be used to account for discursive phenomena. Instead, cognitive issues are respecified as discursive phenomena. Discursive psychologists do this by studying discursive practices of talking about mental phenomena and using…

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…

It follows from the ordering principles that are applied in Functional Discourse Grammar that the positional possibilities of markers of agreement and those of cross-reference are different. Markers of cross reference are predicted to occur closer to the verb stem, while markers of agreement would occupy peripheral positions. This paper tests…

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,…

How does the developing child bridge the ontological gap from the empirical, measurable world of behavioral patterns, anatomical structures, and neurological processes to the world of the linguistic phenomena referred to by the expressions of commonsense metalinguistic discourse: words, meanings, names, truth, languages, understanding, and so on?…

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…

Dynamic and interactive uses of personal pronouns are usually not as neat as traditional grammar describes in that the first and second person pronoun index speakers and addressees in a speech event. Devoted to a prevalent feature of Mandarin Chinese conversation--the switch of the first person singular pronoun "wo", "I", and the second person…

Scientific discourse is characterized by multi-semiotic construction and the resultant semantic expansions. To date, there remains a lack of analytical methods to explicate the multiplicative nature of meaning. Drawing on the theories of systemic functional linguistics, this article examines the meaning-making processes across language and…

This study explored Mandarin-speaking mothers' referential choice in relation to informativeness. The data consisted of two Mandarin-speaking mothers' natural conversation with their children, collected when the children were between the ages of 2;2 and 3;1. The subject and object arguments of the mothers' utterances were coded for the categories…

Hobbs [Hobbs, J.R., 1979. "Coherence and coreference." "Cognitive Science" 3, 67-90] claims that the interpretation of inter-sentential anaphors "falls out" as a "by-product" of using a particular coherence relation to integrate two discourse units. The article argues that this is only partly true. Taking the reader's perspective, I suggest that…

This paper is an application of Robert E. MacLaury's Vantage Theory (VT) to the analysis of real life spoken discourse. It utilizes Dennis R. Preston's (1994) modification of MacLaury's VT. It elucidates how cognitive processes of coordinate selection and combination contribute to the on-line construction of category membership in the abstract…

The paper investigates Polish punk and hip hop (rap) song lyrics broken down into frequency lists. In an analysis inspired by MacLaury's view of categorization, the construals of punk and hip hop worldviews are shown to vary in the distance of the observer from the world, the width of the viewing frame, as well as the granularity and density of…