General principles of linearization in Functional Discourse Grammar

This chapter proposes a number of refinements of the approach to line-arization in Functional Discourse Grammar. It argues for an additional sentential layer at the Morphosyntactic Level, and shows how the introduction of such a layer may provide a means to account for the placement of, among others, backgrounded elements. It furthermore introduces a number of additional precedence principles in linearization that take into account the hierarchical structure of FDG, such as the precedence of predicates over arguments and the precedence of functions over operators over modifiers, while also recognizing the importance of a prag-matic and a semantic function hierarchy, as well as other pragmatic and semantic factors. Subsequently, the various innovations are applied to examples from lan-guages with different basic constituent orders: two predicate-medial languages (English and Dutch, the latter a V2 language), a predicate-final language (Turkish), and a predicate-initial language (Tagalog). In doing so, we show that the modified approach allows us to account for a range of frequently attested linear patterns in these languages, while excluding unacceptable sequences.