Introducing Some Aspects of Functional Discourse Grammar; Some Persian Typological Evidences

Abstract

Functional Discourse Grammar presented by Hengveld and Mackenzei (2008) as one of the newest Functional Grammar. This theory is mainly based on Dick’s Functional Grammar (1970s). According to Dick, every perfect Grammar should have Pragmatic, Psychological and Typological adequacy. FDG considers a top-down procedures for making speech for the sake of psychological adequacy. For acquiring Pragmatic adequacy, Speech act is considered as the basic element of studying in this approach. Furthermore, In FDG, language is studied in four separated levels in a top-down manner. The order of levels reveals the governing notion of functional and pragmatic units on formal and syntactic ones. Furthermore, FDG introduces a new approach for constituent order which has 84 positions in contrast to Greenberg (1963) 6 positions theory. In this paper, the general principles of FDG and different steps for making speech act is presented by giving Persian examples. Alongside this presentation, some typological behavior of Persian based on FDG and analyzing some Persian grammatical and discoursal phenomenon are discussed.

Keywords

• functional discourse grammar
• pragmatic adequacy
• psychological adequacy
• typological adequacy