Volume 54, Issue 5 - Special Issue: The lexicon in Functional Discourse Grammar, Guest Editors: Inge Genee and Evelien Keizer

This paper discusses the treatment of the lexicon in Functional Discourse Grammar (FDG) and serves to provide a general introduction to the theoretical framework and its formalizations, in particular for readers who may not be intimately familiar with it. After outlining the general architecture of the model, we discuss the position, content and function of the FDG lexicon in more detail. The FDG lexicon is often called the Fund, as it contains more than just a collection of lexemes. The Fund is conceived of as a storehouse containing all unpredictable linguistic knowledge in the form of various types of primitives. In addition to a lexicon proper this includes structural and grammatical primitives that feed the grammar, such as: pragmatic and semantic frames, functions and operators; morphosyntactic and phonological templates and operators; and suppletive forms. The “lexicon proper” contains grammatical morphemes and suppletive forms in addition to lexemes; the collection of frames and templates is sometimes called the “structicon”; and operators and functions constitute what may be called the “grammaticon”. The division of labor between the Fund and the Grammar is illustrated by showing how FDG treats lexeme, word and frame formation: lexeme formation is located in the Fund, word formation is located in the Grammar, and frame formation may be located in either, depending on the particular frame or the approach of the analyst. We then discuss the form and content of lexical entries. This has been a topic of some discussion recently, and several of the contributions to this special issue contain proposals in this area. The central question here is how best to capture the existence of common or even default associations between primitives at different levels of representation while still allowing for the occurrence of mismatches. Mismatches allow us to account for phenomena like coercion and other creative uses of the linguistic apparatus available to the language user. Next we address the construction of lexical meaning, showing where FDG draws the line between semantics on the one hand and pragmatics, contextual factors, and conceptualization on the other hand. Here again, different points of view coexist and several contributions contain proposals for how to represent lexical meaning. Our final section briefly introduces the other contributions to this special issue.

This article discusses the organization of the lexicon component in Functional Discourse Grammar with special attention to the representation of lexical meaning. After a brief introduction, Section 2 reviews the role of the lexicon in current FDG and explains the reasons why it receives a rather marginal position. It is argued that this is very much related to the theory’s top-down organization and its emphasis on the analysis of linguistic structure. In Section 3 it is claimed that a functional lexicon should be understood as a flexible entity, rather than a static repository of lexical information, and that the organization and structure of a lexicon constructed on functional principles should be compatible with demands of a different nature (cognitive, acquisitional-evolutionary, typological and communicative). Accordingly, Section 4 proposes a flexible model of the lexicon for FDG, which is compatible with those methodological demands. The key insight is that meaning definitions are not fixed entities but lists of potentially revisable specifications that speakers agree upon or negotiate in language use. The stability of lexical meaning is explained on the basis of speakers’ recurrent experiences in the use of lexical items, which determine the meaning that the linguistic community is likely to consider normal lexical competence. This section further illustrates the benefits of this proposal for the study of syntactic alternations and lexical innovations. Finally, I show how lexemes can be linked to frames on the basis of both the type of conceptual entity denoted by the lexeme and its correspondence with FDG semantic categories.

Departing from a proposal by Keizer on how to bridge the gap between the grammar and the lexicon in Functional Discourse Grammar (FDG), this article deals with three aspectual verbal periphrases in Spanish, which are, in the order of their degrees of grammaticalization, (i) weakly grammaticalized resultative tener +participle, (ii) egressive parar de +infinitive and (iii) strongly grammaticalized habitual soler +infinitive. In spite of their different syntactic behaviors, none of them is a truly lexical or truly grammatical item. After a detailed description of the syntax and semantics of these auxiliary constructions in comparison with truly auxiliary constructions, the article discusses the proposal by García Velasco (this issue) for the lexicon in FDG. This serves as a starting point for the development of the concept of lexical auxiliaries, which is then applied to the three periphrastic constructions. The representation of these constructions in FDG makes use of “combinations of partially instantiated frames,” introduced by Keizer (this issue), and adequately reflects the meanings and the morphosyntactic structure of lexical auxiliaries.

This article addresses the question of how the theory of Functional Discourse Grammar (FDG), with its clear distinction between lexicon and grammar, can deal with semi-fixed constructions by proposing a consistent and cognitively plausible account of idiomatic expressions that can not only deal with the partly unpredictable and partly productive character of these expressions, but also with the variation within the class of idioms. It is argued that, on the basis of both semantic and syntactic criteria, three major types of idiom can be distinguished. Subsequently, an FDG analysis is provided which shows that the syntactic behavior of these types is not entirely arbitrary and unpredictable, but that it can to a large extent be accounted for by the specific functional properties of each of these types. Finally, the article addresses the question of how to represent idioms in the FDG lexicon. It is suggested that the lexical entry of an idiom should take the form of a meaning definition which is associated with a semi-fixed combination of interpersonal and representation frames and morphosyntactic templates specifying the functional and formal constraints on individual idioms, while at the same time accounting for the (different degrees of) syntactic flexibility exhibited by the three major types of idiom. All that is needed for idioms to be integrated in the theory of FDG, it is concluded, is the introduction of a new primitive, the so-called ComPIF (Combination of Partially Instantiated Frames).

This article explores the use of affix-like elements of dubious status in word formation and proposes an analysis within Functional Discourse Grammar (Hengeveld and Mackenzie 2008. Functional Discourse Grammar: A typologically-based theory of language structure . Oxford: University Press). What these elements have in common is that they are all used recurrently in the formation of new words of the same type and result from general patterns used by speakers. Additionally, some of these formatives are semantically reinterpreted when embedded in morphologically complex forms. The proposal in this article is to analyze cases where meaningful bound morphemes take part as processes that take place within the lexicon by the insertion of a semantically compatible lexeme in a partially filled lexical frame. This analysis manages to distinguish cases in which a meaningful element is used as a free and a bound morpheme, since the FDG architecture dictates that free meaningful morphemes are analyzed as Stems, while bound morphemes with lexical content are analyzed as Roots at the Morphosyntactic Level. The units resulting from processes where bound meaningful elements intervene are analyzed as complex words consisting of a Stem and a Root at the Morphosyntactic Level. By contrast, the formation of complex words by the concatenation of free morphemes is accounted for by invoking a process of compounding within the grammar, whereby the combination of the lexemes at the Representational Level creates one complex property, which results in a complex word formed by two Stems at the Morphosyntactic Level.

This article considers the treatment of causatives in Functional Discourse Grammar (FDG) in relation to questions regarding the division of labor between the Grammar and the Lexicon in Functional Discourse Grammar (FDG). The focus is on causative constructions in which the causativizer affixes to the verb in so-called polysynthetic languages. In this respect the article also contributes to the treatment of polysynthesis in FDG. The central question is whether the causative construction is a derived lexeme created in the lexicon and inserted into the grammatical structure as a single lexical unit, or whether it is created in the grammar as a synthetic construction involving two lexical units. The article describes the pertinent morphosyntactic and semantic properties of causative constructions in Blackfoot, a polysynthetic language belonging to the Algonquian language family. I show that such constructions contain two events, each with their own semantic properties including argument structure and modifiability. In FDG this is accounted for by analyzing the semantic configuration at the Representational Level of analysis as a complex Episode consisting of two States-of-Affairs, while analyzing the morphosyntactic configuration at the Morphosyntactic Level as a complex verbal Word containing two verbal Roots, one of which is the causativizer. The causativizer is analyzed as an independent verbal lexeme stored in the lexicon rather than as derivational morpheme. This analysis follows logically from the way in which FDG conceptualizes polysynthesis, namely as a morphological type which allows the presence of more than one lexical element within a single word.

This study takes Functional Discourse Grammar (FDG) as its theoretical framework, and applies to the phenomena under study the FDG terminology, which may differ from what many readers are used to. Esperanto has an agglutinating morphology. Its words are built on stems which are associated with contentive lexemes in a flexible system of parts of speech. The language has an elaborate stock of lexically dependent morphemes (roots in FDG) for lexeme building. Many basic words are stem-root combinations in Esperanto. The roots applied in them also appear in complex structures, and can be reordered and interchanged easily to produce different complex stems. For this reason, derivation is taken to be hosted in the lexicon. The lexicon must contain a highly developed procedural knowledge component, of which the derivation system is assumed to be a part. Some of the suffixable roots have homonymous variants that define grammatical processes. The combinatorial freedom of roots provides for a lexical expansion tool which is easy to handle, but not without complications. Problematic is the (in)transitivity of lexemes destined to verbal encoding, when applied in an environment that is not naturally theirs. This phenomenon is known to be an important source of mistakes among speakers of the language. It is argued that the lexicon of Esperanto speakers contains paired transitive and intransitive representations of the most current lexemes of this category. The study aims at providing support to better understand the mechanisms at work inside the lexicon and at the interface between the lexicon and the grammar of agglutinating languages.

This article contains a series of reflections on the nature of the lexicon in FDG inspired in large measure by the preceding articles. We start by considering how the lexicon relates to the Conceptual Component, arguing that lexemes do not label units of conceptualization but rather are associated with experientially based beliefs about their appropriate use. In our view, the Conceptual Component first develops a Message, which then influences the choice of a frame in the Grammatical Component into which appropriate lexemes are inserted. Lexemes are thus not inherently associated with frames, as was proposed in earlier work. Instead, they are marked with numerical indicators for the set of frames with which they are compatible, with coercion allowing one-off extensions of that frameset. It is a further consequence of our position that lexemes come with neither meaning definitions nor selection restrictions. We adopt Keizer’s notion of partially instantiated frames to account for idiomatic expressions. We then turn to parts-of-speech, as they apply to lexemes in various language types. Lexemes are distinguished from Words: for example, the single class of Contentives in the Esperanto lexicon corresponds to Verb Words, Noun Words, etc. in morphosyntax. This leads to a discussion of derivation and compounding, where it is shown that two types of derivation are to be distinguished in FDG, lexical derivation, which uses lexical primitives ($) as its input, and grammatical derivation, which takes place after insertion of a lexeme into its frame. Three major types of compounding are differentiated and exemplified from English and Dutch: predicate-argument, nucleus-modifier, and conjunct-conjunct compounds, each of which can be either endocentric or exocentric. Turning finally to the difficulty of drawing a sharp distinction between the lexicon and the grammar, we apply Keizer’s (2007) distinctions among primary and secondary lexical elements and primary and secondary grammatical elements, showing how findings from various of the preceding articles can be interpreted in this light.