Morphosyntactic Alternations in English - Functional and Cognitive Perspectives - Pilar Guerrero Medina
5. The causative/inchoative alternation in Functional Discourse Grammar
Morphosyntactic Alternations in English - Functional and Cognitive Perspectives - Pilar Guerrero Medina
Daniel García Velasco
University of Oviedo
Description
Daniel García Velasco’s contribution offers an FDG approach to the causative/inchoative alternation, showing that a proper account of this alternation (in English and other languages) should pay attention to the way in which events are conceptually constructed by speakers. The author explores the extent to which FDG can handle this alternation more adequately than Classical Functional Grammar. The introduction of a Conceptual component, including those aspects of cognition which are relevant for the immediate communicative intention, and the separation of lexemes from the frames in which they occur, are presented as relevant aspects of the FDG model to account for this process.