scientific article; zbMATH DE number 234486

Research exposition (monographs, survey articles) pertaining to computer science (68-02) Grammars and rewriting systems (68Q42) Natural language processing (68T50) Linguistics (91F20)

Review text

The books modifies and extends the theoretical framework of functional grammar, an approach to the grammatical description of natural languages originally published by the same author in 1978. Intended to appear in two volumes this first volume sets out the basic principles underlying the theory of functional grammar, and discusses the structure of simple (non-derived, non-complex) clauses. The functional paradigm of grammar theory stresses the instrumentality of language with respect to what people do and achieve with it in social interaction. As such, any natural language is seen as an integrated part of the communicative competence of natural language understanding. Rule systems exist which govern the constitution of linguistic expressions (semantic, syntactic, morphological, and phonological rules), but these rule systems are seen as instrumental with respect to the goals and purposes of pragmatic rules which govern the patterns of verbal interaction in which these linguistic expressions are used. Consequently, pragmatics is seen as the all-encompassing framework within which semantics and syntax must be studied. Based on these methodological assumptions, the fundamental concepts of the theory of functional grammar are introduced (pragmatic information, intention, meaning, interpretation, language universals, etc.). Next, the model of functional grammar is described considering clauses in terms of an abstract underlying clause structure which is mapped onto the actual form of the corresponding linguistic expression by a system of expression rules, thus determining the form, the order, and the intonation patterns of the constituents of the underlying clause structure. From these methodological preliminaries the theory of functional grammars is developed in considerable details. First, the properties of the basic (lexical) predicate frames which underlie the construction of nuclear predictions are discussed, including the treatment of selection restrictions, meaning postulates, and the semantic functions which may be attached to the argument positions of nuclear predicate frames. One chapter discusses the nature of ``referring (which is interpreted as a cooperative action of speaker and addressee) leading to a classification of the types of expression that can be used to constrain the creation or the retrieval of the intended referent. Another chapter treats the various types of term operators which may go into the construction of term structures: definiteness, specificity, genericity, demonstratives, quantifiers (including cardinals), ordinals, and the operators used for specifying questioned, relativized, and anaphoric terms. Then the treatment of non-verbal predicates in functional grammar (those consisting of an adjective, a noun, a term, an adpositional phrase) is discussed introducing the notion of copula support.This chapter ends with a discussion of locative and existential sentence types. Next, several means of extending nuclear predications (yielding core and extended predications) are introduced and the state of affairs designated by core predications is located in the spatial, temporal, and cognitive dimensions of language descriptions. The next chapter treats the mechanism of subject and object assignment, interpreted in terms of the notion of perspective. It is argued that subject/object assignments are sensitive to a cross-linguistically valid semantic function hierarchy which is re-examined in the following chapter. There is also a brief discussion of raising phenomena and of markedness shift with respect to subject/object assignment and its relation to ergativity. The next chapter shows how to extended predication can be built into a propositional structure and its extension by attitudinal operators, and how the resulting extended proposition can be built into a clause structure at the speech act level. Then, it discusses the extension of the clause structure with illocutionary operators. Another chapter treats the mechanisms of pragmatic function assignment, introduces the notions of topicality and focality, and distinguishes a number of topic and focus functions. The next two chapters discuss some general properties of expressions rules, sketches a theory of those rules which determine the form of the constituents of the underlying predication, and what sorts of formal effects are brought about by the different operators and functions which characterize the constituents in the underlying structure of the clause. Then, the placement rules which are responsible for the order of constituents in the resulting linguistic expression are discussed. The final chapter outlines how expression rules define the prosodic contours of linguistic expressions, taking into account the intrinsic tonal and accentual properties of predictes, the possible influence exerted on such properties by the formal expression rules, and the prosodic effects of pragmatic functions and illocutionary operators.

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