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In:The Interpersonal Level in Functional Discourse Grammar
Edited by Monielly Serafim, Matthias Mittendorfer and Kees Hengeveld
[Studies in Language Companion Series 241] 2027
► pp. 285–315

Clause linking and information structure

A FDG analysis of English purpose and result adverbial clauses

ORCiD logo with link | University of Graz
This content is being prepared for publication; it may be subject to changes.
Abstract
This paper examines English purpose and result clauses introduced by so(that) within FDG, arguing that these categories are more heterogeneous than traditionally assumed. Looking at corpus data, I propose that purpose clauses are embedded Communicated Contents within the Comment layer, reflecting their shared illocution and focal status. Result clauses exhibit greater diversity; the paper identifies three types of result clauses, each associated with a distinct Content frame. The analysis further demonstrates that so(that) clauses modifying directives cannot be treated merely as variants of purpose clauses, but that share key aspects of their information-structure organization with result clauses. The analysis refines FDG representations of adverbial clauses and clarifies the interaction between information structure and discourse organization.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Distinguishing between purpose and result
    • 2.1Semantic and pragmatic features
    • 2.2Syntactic features
    • 2.4Purpose vs result resumé
  • 3.Adverbial clauses
    • 3.1Classification of adverbial clauses
    • 3.2Adverbial clauses in Functional Discourse Grammar
  • 4.Purpose clauses
  • 5.Result clauses
    • 5.1Immediate cause-result events
    • 5.2Cause-Result between separate events
    • 5.3Result as a conclusion
  • 6.Purpose and result with directives
    • 6.1Dependent clause as directive
    • 6.2Directive and a dependent purpose clause
    • 6.3Directive and a dependent result clause
  • 7.Discussion and conclusion
  • Author queries
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
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