A Functional Discourse Grammar for English

This is the first textbook on Functional Discourse Grammar, a recently developed theory of language structure which analyses utterances at four independent levels of grammatical representation: pragmatic, semantic, morphosyntactic and phonological. The book offers a very systematic and highly accessible introduction to the theory: following the top-down organization of the model, it takes the reader step-by-step though the various levels of analysis (from pragmatics down to phonology), while at the same time providing a detailed account of the interaction between these different levels. The many exercises, categorized according to degree of difficulty, ensure that students are challenged to use the theory in a creative manner, and invite them to test and evaluate the theory by applying it to the new data in various linguistic contexts.

Evelien Keizer uses examples from a variety of sources to demonstrate how the theory of Functional Discourse Grammar can be used to analyse and explain the most important functional and formal features of present-day English. The book also contains examples from a wide variety of other typologically diverse languages, making it attractive not only to students of English linguistics but to anyone interested in linguistic theory more generally.

Evelien Keizer is Professor of English Linguistics at the University of Vienna. Her main interest is in the interplay between the discourse-pragmatic, semantic, syntactic, and phonological properties of linguistic expressions. Her overall approach is a functional-cognitive one; more specifically she works within the framework of Functional Discourse Grammar. Her publications includeThe English Noun Phrase: The Nature of Linguistic Categorization (CUP, 2007) andThe Syntax of Dutch: The Noun Phrase, Vol. 1 (Amsterdam University Press, 2011). Her current research interests include syntactic alternations, linguistic categorization, and the analysis of semi-fixed expressions.