Functional Grammar and the dynamics of
discourse
María de los Ángeles Gómez-González
- Introduction
From its inception to the present day (see Anstey, this volume) Functional
Grammar (FG) has striven to satisfy the three criteria of functional ade-
quacy it set for itself, i.e. pragmatic adequacy, psychological adequacy and
typological adequacy.^1 Accordingly, a prime concern for FG co-workers
has been to provide linguistic descriptions with a strongly universalist bent
so as to not only relate as closely as possible to the rules and principles
governing verbal interaction, but also to dovetail with psychological mod-
els of linguistic competence and linguistic behaviour (Dik 1997: 13, 17).
To better suit these demands, in particular to span the perceived gap be-
tween discourse/cognition and grammar (Mackenzie and Keizer 1991;
Gómez-González 1998b, 2001), a number of FG representatives have felt it
necessary to work towards a discourse- and cognitively oriented expansion
of the standard model, which is, broadly, a lexico-semantically based,
three-staged bottom-up layered framework converting lexical elements and
terms into pragmatico-semantic constructs, converted in turn into prepho-
netic strings through the operation of expression rules (Dik 1997: 58ff.;
Hengeveld 1997). Crucially, in this standard model conceptual unity is en-
tailed between discourse and grammatical analysis by treating each
utterance as a mini-discourse (cf. also Moutaouakil, this volume).
By contrast, Kroon (1997), Bolkestein (1998), Steuten (1998a, b), Vet
(1998), Van den Berg (1998), Connolly (1998, this volume) and Fortescue
(this volume) assume that grammar and discourse are in essence inc-
ommensurable, and accordingly assign corresponding modules to
grammar, which is static and out-of-time, on the one hand, and to dis-
course, which is dynamic and ongoing in time, on the other. A different
position is taken by Nuyts’s (1992, this volume) Functional Procedural