Towards a speaker model of FG 361Bakker and Siewierska (2002), and following Mackenzie (1992), we defend
the position that some adpositions should be seen as predicates rather than
grammatical elements.- Givón (1983), basing himself on text counts, gives an estimate of between
80% and 90% of the cases in running text. - This has, of course, a direct bearing on the (sub)theory of syntactic catego-
ries. To date, FG has not developed any theory of the kind; notions such as
Noun Phrase and Prepositional Phrase are used in a more or less theory-
independent fashion (cf. Rijkhoff 1992). Our point of departure will be that
a syntactic category is in the first place the prototypical formal correlate of
some underlying element: e.g. an NP is the prototypical expression form of
a term. To the extent that (formal) generalizations are possible over such
categories, they may be assigned a language-independent, or universal
status. It is unclear to us at the moment to what extent syntactic categories
sui generis will turn out to be necessary. - Of course, there are different ways to represent corrected underlying ele-
ments. For example, we could merge instead of replace, and maintain the
old, rejected material. Then we could have something like (i):
i. [(def (3 OR 4) (1: precise [A]) x 9 : minute [N]:
(def sg x 10 : hour [N])POST)TEMP]
We think, however, that our replacement solution is closer to the intuition
that the speaker will most probably remember the latest version as part of
the discourse structure. The fact that he made a correction is possibly re-
membered as such in the episodic memory, which also stores a number of
details about the conversation, but not as a part of the story as it is told.
References
Bakker, Dik
1989 A formalism for Functional Grammar expression rules. In: John H.
Connolly and Simon C. Dik (eds). 45–64.
1994 Formal and Computational Aspects of Functional Grammar and
Language Typology. Amsterdam: IFOTT.
1999 FG Expression Rules: From templates to constituent structure’.
Working Papers in Functional Grammar 67.
2001 The FG expression rules: A dynamic model. Revista Canaria de
Estudios Ingleses 42. 15–53.
Bakker, Dik and Anna Siewierska
2002 Adpositions, the lexicon and expression rules. In: Ricardo Mairal
Usón and Maria Jesús Pérez Quintero (eds). 125–177.