Raising in Functional Discourse Grammar

Abstract

This chapter deals with the phenomenon of subject and object raising and proposes an analysis within Functional Discourse Grammar as presented in Hengeveld and Mackenzie (2008). After an introduction to the main properties of raising, Section 3 argues that the pragmatic motivation of raising is to establish textual cohesion and thematic continuity in discourse by keeping a referent active. This is illustrated with Spanish corpus data. Section 4 develops an analysis within the theory of Functional Discourse Grammar and shows that its four-level architecture is adequate to capture the properties of raising and to account for the tension between semantics, syntax and pragmatics in the process. However, it is argued that the theory would benefit by the introduction of a new dimension of pragmatic organization which would serve to represent the pragmatic properties of raising in a more effective way.