FUNCTIONAL GENERATIVE DESCRIPTION, WORD ORDER AND FOCUS

Abstract

Issues that have been discussed recently in the context of the Praguian Functional Generative Description are revisited, with special attention given to the canonical ordering of sentence parts and to Focus. Dependency based grammar with complex node labels is understood as a suitable descriptive framework, reflecting prototypical basic facts such as the syntactic relations being expressed by morphemes and the topic-focus articulation by word order (and by sentence prosody). Contextual coreference can be captured with the inclusion of a hierarchy of degrees of activation of the elements in the 'stock of shared knowledge'. Such an approach may be useful both for retaining the truth-conditional foundations of semantic interpretation and for explaining the relative easiness of natural language acquisition as connected with the interactivity of natural language and its anchoring in communication. A successive elaboration of the approach should be continued.