FG from its inception 59
presented in Weijdema et al. (1982), but Dik introduced it first in his 1985
FG lecture notes.
- Vet’s (1986) paper is very important to Hengeveld, who regularly quotes
from it, since he adopts Vet’s argument that predicational adverbs restrict
the predication, thus justifying representations such as the following:
Pierre arrived at eight o’clock
PAST ei: [arriveV (d1xi: PierreN (xi))Proc] (ei): [eight o’clockN] (ei)
The two (ei)’s in the structure mean that both Pierre arrives and eight
o’clock apply to the discourse event (ei). This somewhat technical point ex-
plains Hengeveld’s preference for each variable in the structure to appear
symmetrically on both sides of the layer the variable has scope over. See
Mackenzie (1987) for an important and neglected alternative to this argu-
ment.
- Hengeveld (1990a: 4) subsequently corrects his terminology to predication
in this notation since the proposition is actually π 3 X 1 : [...] (X 1 ). Note, how-
ever, that in the same volume, Hengeveld (1990: 107) again incorrectly uses
proposition.
- The reason that two ‘X’ and two ‘e’ variables occur is that epistemic and
objective modality are expressed respectively by the lexical items (seemV
and possibleA). Note that Hengeveld’s use of such lexeme-based forms in
this example prohibits the canonical use of operators to represent grammati-
calized semantic categories. This practice possibly diminishes the
typological strength of the notation.
- There are three other contributions worth mentioning. Vester (1983) adds
Change and Momentaneous to the SoA typology, based on the works of
Vendler and Dowty; Brown (1985) introduces a lot more sophistication re-
garding term operators; and Dik (1987) provides a typology of entities using
Bunt’s (1985) work.
- See Keizer (1992a) for an excellent discussion of other more subtle differ-
ences, particularly Dik’s unexplained introduction of the ‘f’ variable for
zero-order entities.
- Since I only encountered Functional Grammar in 1999, I cannot speak of
the broader (and clearly significant) impact of Simon’s death on the FG
community in general. Machtelt Bolkestein (p.c.) kindly provided this brief
comment: “After Simon’s death his PhD students were re-distributed over
the other FG-minded available professors, and naturally their own works
underwent both a slowing down at least for a while, and perhaps also some
changes. All in all the first year after his death there was a very depressed
atmosphere, which picked up after (and perhaps partly due to) the Córdoba
conference on FG [1996]”.
