The Place of Interpersonal Lexemes in Linguistic Theory, with Special Reference to Functional Discourse Grammar

Abstract

The paper presents a critical assessment of the place reserved for lexical expressions with discourse-related meanings in four major functional theories of language, also considering a few narrower-scope accounts of linguistically encoded pragmatic meaning. I argue that the status of discourse-related lexemes is not duly recognized in most functionally-oriented frameworks and make the point that, by contrast, Functional Discourse Grammar finds itself in an optimal position to offer an adequate account of this specific type of linguistic expressions. Yet, I will claim that the Functional Discourse Grammar approach to lexical expressions of pragmatic meaning is not entirely satisfactory, namely in that the lexemes in question are assumed to be inserted into the relevant slots of underlying pragmatic structure without being modeled as a separate type of linguistic unit. I will therefore suggest that discourse-related lexemes be redefined as a distinct layer of the hierarchically organized pragmatic structure of linguistic utterances, just as lexemes with purely representational content are assigned to a distinct layer of semantic structure. Empirically, the advantages of this proposal are illustrated with the analysis of authentic English examples, mainly from the GloWbE corpus (https://corpus.byu.edu/glowbe/: Davies and Fuchs in English World-Wide 36:1–28, 2015), plus a number of other examples from the internet and from previously published research.