A New Architecture for Functional Grammar (Functional Grammar Series)

Towards a speaker model of FG 333

The constraints implied by principles 1–5 above determine the informa-
tion flow through the expression tree that is dynamically constructed by
them. It is crucial what functional and formal information may be available
at which node in the tree during tree expansion. In order to accommodate
this information, we think that nodes should have the following internal
structure, depicted in Figure 2.

LABEL

Functional aspects

CONFIGURATION

FUNCTIONAL FEATURES

Formal aspects

FORMAL FEATURES

SUBCATEGORIZATION

Figure 2. Structure of a node

A node has the following fields associated with it. The label (Lab)
represents the category of a slot in a template, such as P1, Subject or Vin-
fin. The configuration (Config) is a specification of some part of the
underlying representation that will be expressed by this node. It cannot be
just any part of the UR; it should be part of the configuration of the mother
node of the one under consideration, for example the specification of the
subject term, a temporal satellite, the head of a term, or the main verbal
predicate. Typically, such descriptions will contain one or more predicates;