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Unit 1: Functional Grammar: Phrase, Clause

• Fused relative clauses, such as “what she did” (in the sense of “the thing she did”), are Notes
like ordinary relative clauses except that they act as noun clauses; they incorporate their
subjects into their relative pronouns.
• Declarative content clauses, such as “that they came,” usually consist of the conjunction that plus
what would otherwise be an independent clause, or of an independent clause alone
(with an implicit preceding that). For this reason, they are often called that-clauses. Declarative
content clauses refer to states of affairs; it is often implied that the state of affairs is the
case, as in “It is fortunate that they came,” but this implication is easily removed by the
context, as in “It is doubtful that they came.”
• Interrogative content clauses, such as “whether they came” and “where he went” (as
in “I don’t know where he went”), are much like declarative ones, except that they
are introduced by interrogative words. Rather than referring to a state of affairs,
they refer to an unknown element of a state of affairs, such as one of the participants
(as in “I wonder who came”) or even the truth of the state (as in “I wonder whether
he came”).
• Small clauses, such as “him leave” (as in “I saw him leave”) and “him to leave” (as in
“I wanted him to leave”), are minimal predicate structures, consisting only of an object
and an additional structure (usually an infinitive), with the latter being predicated to
the former by a controlling verb or preposition.

1.5 Summary

• Functional Grammar (FG), as developed by Simon Dik and others, is a general theory of
the organization of natural language.
• Most phrases have an important word defining the type and linguistic features of the
phrase. This word is the head of the phrase and gives its name to the phrase category.
• Prepositional phrase (PP) with a preposition as head (e.g. in love, over the rainbow).
• Noun phrase (NP) with a noun as head (e.g. the black cat, a cat on the mat)

• Verb phrase (VP) with a verb as head (e.g. eat cheese, jump up and down)
• Phrases can also be classified by the “head” of the phrase, which is the key word in the phrase.
• A clause is a part of a sentence. There are two main types: independent (main clauses),
dependent (subordinate clauses).
• An independent clause is a complete sentence; it contains a subject and verb and expresses
a complete thought in both context and meaning.
• A dependent (subordinate) clause is part of a sentence; it contains a subject and verb but
does not express a complete thought. They can make sense on their own, but, they are
dependent on the rest of the sentence for context and meaning.
• There are three main types of dependent clause: noun clauses, adjective clauses, and adverb
clauses, so-called for their syntactic and semantic resemblance to nouns, adjectives, and
adverbs, respectively.

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