This study draws upon the Platonic dialogue tradition as a background for interpreting the conversation between More and his daughter Margaret Roper, as depicted in Margaret’s letter to Alice Alington. With an eye to the famously ironic Socrates, this article will propose the interpretation of a puzzling statement regarding More’s apparent good faith in the sincerity of others who have reversed their positions regarding the problematic oath. Is More expressing ironic distance or straightforward charity in his ambiguous language? The argument is that More, utilizing his legal and literary skills, carefully crafts a rhetoric that paradoxically joins remarkable charity with worldly-wise irony.
ABSTRACT Functional Discourse Grammar (FDG) is a typologically-based theory of language structure which is organized in levels, layers and components. In this paper, I will claim that FDG is modular in Sadock’s sense, as it presents four independent levels of representation with their own linguistic primitives each. For modular grammars, the relation between the different levels (more technically, the nature of the interfaces) is a central issue. It will be shown that FDG is a top-down grammar which follows two basic principles in its dynamic implementation: Depth-first and Maximal depth. Together with external constraints, these principles conspire to create linguistic representations which are psychologically adequate and which allow levels to be circumvented if necessary, thus simplifying representations and creating mismatches among them.
The second issue of Volume 39 (autumn 2016) of the Nordic Journal of Linguistics will be a special issue devoted to discourse, grammar and intersubjectivity. This issue will be edited by Marja Etelämäki, Ilona Herlin, Tapani Möttönen and Laura Visapää.
This paper will elaborate the different Platonic elements of dialogue as philosophical basis for Gadamerian hermeneutical structures. The intersubjective cross-examination found in Plato’s Dialogue shows that the real meaning comes from the real encounters between speakers; or in Gadamer’s term: encounters between text and the reader. For Gadamer, it is always important in this pursuit of meaning and truth that we examine our own prejudice. Cross-examining our own claim of truth and belief is an essential element in Gadamer’s hermeneutics. I argue that we can see how the Platonic model of dialogue is easily aligned with the Gadamerian positive approach towards ‘traditions.’ There is a constant dialogue at work in interpretation, a dialogue between the past and the present, between different traditions and points of view. Dialogue is an important keyword for both Plato and Gadamer in their efforts to their existential quest of wisdom.
This article presents a proposal for the organization of the Contextual Component in Functional Discourse Grammar. A guiding principle in this proposal is that, given the fact that Functional Discourse Grammar is a theory of grammar, the Contextual Component should provide the information that is necessary for a proper functioning of the grammar rather than aim at an exhaustive specification of all the information that plays a role in interpreting linguistic expressions. The Contextual Component contains situational and discursive information and is organized in different strata that correspond to the interpersonal, representational, morphosyntactic, and phonological levels of representation within the grammar. The contextual representations make use of the same formalizations as the corresponding linguistic representations, thus allowing for direct exchange of information between the Grammatical and the Contextual Components. Thus exchange of information is handled by an interface called the contextualizer. The article illustrates the functioning of this model by analyzing the role of contextual information with respect to three grammatical phenomena in three different languages: Unexpressed arguments in Turkish, English too, and answers to yes/no questions in European Portuguese.
Modularity and derivation in Functional Discourse Grammar