The articles in this volume analyse the noun phrase within the framework of Functional Discourse Grammar (FDG), the successor to Simon C. Dik's Functional Grammar. In its current form, FDG has an explicit top-down organization and distinguishes four hierarchically organized, interacting levels: (i) the interpersonal level (language as communicational process), (ii) the representational level (language as a carrier of content), (iii) the morphosyntactic level and (iv) the phonological level. Together they constitute the grammatical component, which in its turn interacts with a cognitive and a communicative component. This comprehensive approach to linguistic analysis is also reflected in this volume, which contains rich and substantial contributions concerning many different aspects of the noun phrase. At the same time, the analysis of a major linguistic construction from various perspectives is an excellent way to test a new model of grammar with regard to some of the standards of adequacy for linguistic theories. The book contains several papers dealing with matters of representation and formalization of the noun phrase (the articles by Kees Hengeveld, Jose Luis Gonzalez Escribano, Jan Rijkhoff and Evelien Keizer). Other contributors are more concerned with the practical application of the model with regard to discourse-interpersonal matters (Chris Butler, John H. Connolly), whereas the chapters by Dik Bakker and Roland Pfau and by Daniel Garcia Velasco deal with morphosyntactic issues. In all, the variety of issues addressed and the range of languages considered prove that one of the important advantages of the FDG model is precisely the fact that grammatical phenomena can be treated from a semantic, pragmatic, morpho-syntactic, phonological or textual perspective in a coherent fashion.

This book is the first major cross-linguistic study of 'flexible words', i.e. words that cannot be classified in terms of the traditional lexical categories Verb, Noun, Adjective or Adverb. Flexible words can - without special morphosyntactic marking - serve in functions for which other languages must employ members of two or more of the four traditional, 'specialised' word classes. Thus, flexible words are underspecified for communicative functions like 'predicating' (verbal function), 'referring' (nominal function) or 'modifying' (a function typically associated with adjectives and e.g. manner adverbs). Even though linguists have been aware of flexible world classes for more than a century, the phenomenon has not played a role in the development of linguistic typology or modern grammatical theory. The current volume aims to address this gap by offering detailed studies on flexible word classes, investigating their properties and what it means for the grammar of a language to have such a word class. It includes new cross-linguistic studies of word class systems as well as original descriptive and theoretical contributions from authors with an expert knowledge of languages that have played - or should play - a role in the debate about flexible word classes, including Kharia, Riau Indonesian, Santali, Sri Lanka Malay, Lushootseed, Gooniyandi, and Late Archaic Chinese.

This book investigates noun phrases in a representative sample of the world's 6,000 or so languages and proposes a semantic model to describe their underlying structure in any natural language. It examines the semantic and morpho-syntactic properties of the constituents of noun phrases. In doing so it shows that the noun phrase word order patterns of any human language can be derived from three universal ordering principles and, furthermore, that these are all elaborations of one general iconic principle according to which elements that belong together semantically tend to occur together syntactically. Professor Rijkhoff analyses the noun phrase as a semantic hierarchy which accommodates four noun modifiers relating to quality, quantity, location, and discourse. Noun phrases and sentences can be similarly analysed, he argues, because they have the same underlying semantic structure that accommodates the same kind of modifier categories. He introduces the notion of Seinsart or 'mode of being' as the nominal counterpart of Aktionsart 'mode of action' in verb semantics. He proposes a new grammatical category of nominal aspect and an implicational universal concerning the occurrence of adjectives as a major word class in the part-of-speech system of a language. The book is clearly organized, easily accessible, and assumes no knowledge of a particular formal or functional theory. It will interest linguists and students of linguistics of all theoretical persuasions, as well as students of the cognitive sciences and anthropology.

Jan Rijkhoff investigates noun phrases - linguistic constructions with the noun as central element - in a representative sample of the world's 6000 languages and proposes a semantic model to describe their underlying structure. Assuming no knowledge of any formal or functional theory of grammar, he shows that the noun phrase word order patterns of any language can be derived from three universal ordering principles and furthermore that these principles are elaborations of a general ordering strategy by which elements that belong together semantically tend to occur together syntactically.