Functional Discourse Grammar - Example

Example

This example analyzes the utterance "I can't find the red pan. It is not in its usual place." according to functional discourse grammar at the interpersonal level.

At the interpersonal level, this utterance is one discourse move, which consists of two discourse acts, one corresponding to "I can't find the red pan." and another corresponding to "It is not in its usual place."

  • The first discourse act consists of:
    • A declarative illocutionary force
    • A speaker, denoted by the word "I"
    • An addressee
    • A communicated content, which consists of:
      • A referential subact corresponding to "I"
      • An ascriptive subact corresponding to "find", which has the function Focus
      • A referential subact corresponding to "the red pan", which contains two ascriptive subacts corresponding to "red" and "pan", and which has the function Topic
  • The second discourse act consists of:
    • A declarative illocutionary force
    • A speaker
    • An addressee
    • A communicated content, which consists of:
      • A referential subact corresponding to "it", which has the function Topic
      • An ascriptive subact corresponding to "in its usual place", which has the function Focus
        • Within this subact there is a referential subact corresponding to "its usual place", which consists of:
          • A referential subact corresponding to "its"
          • An ascriptive subact corresponding to "usual"
          • An ascriptive subact corresponding to "place"

Similar analysis, decomposing the utterance into progressively smaller units, is possible at the other levels of the grammatical component.

Read more about this topic:  Functional Discourse Grammar

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