Danish Functional School
For the architectural style of the same name, see Danish Functionalism (architecture).The Danish school of functional linguistics was developed in an attempt to combine modern functional grammar and cognitive linguistics with the best ideas and concepts of the earlier structuralist school. Like Hjelmslev and Saussure the school insist in the basic structural division of communication in planes of content and expression. Like Simon Dik and functionalist grammarians Danish functionalists also insist that language is fundamentally a means of communication between humans and is best understood and analysed through its communicative function. When analysing linguistic utterances the content and expression planes are analysed separately, with the expression plane being analysed through traditional structural methods and the content plane being analysed mostly through methods from semantics and pragmatics. However it is assumed that structures on the expression plane mirrors structures on the content plane. This can be seen in the parallelism between the structure of Danish sentences as described by the structural syntactic model of Paul Diderichsen dividing utterances into three basic fields a foundation field, a nexus field and a content field, and the pragmatic structure of utterances that often use the foundation field for discourse pragmatic functions, the nexus field for illocutionary functions and the content field for the linguistic message. Danish functionalists assume that an utterance is not to be analysed from the minimal units and up, but rather from the maximal units and down, because speakers begin the construction of utterances by choosing what to say in a given situation, then by choosing the words to use and finally by building the sentence by means of sounds.
An example of a two planed analysis is given below in the analysis of the utterance "The book hasn't been read by anyone for a while". The Expression plane consists of "the book" which is a noun phrase with a determiner, a finite verb with a negational adverb "hasn't", and a passive verbal phrase "been read" with an agent "by anyone" and a time adverb "for a while". On the content plane "the book" has the function of topic of the utterance, that which the sentence is about and which links it to the larger discourse, the function of "hasn't" is to state the illocutionary force of the declarative utterance, and the predicate is the message "hasn't been read by anyone for a while" which is intended to be communicated.
| Utterance: | The book | hasn't | been read by anyone for a while. |
|---|---|---|---|
| Expression | Determiner/Noun | Nexus: Intransitive Verb/Present tense/negation | Passive verb/Agent/Time adverb |
| Content | Topic - known information | Declarative illocutionary force | Predicate: to be read/Specifier: by anyone/Time frame: for a while |
Read more about this topic: Copenhagen School (linguistics)
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