PP extraction and extraposition in Functional Discourse Grammar

This article inquires into the nature of ‘attributive’ prepositional phrases from a Functional Discourse Grammar (FDG) perspective. On the basis of the observation that such prepositional phrases can easily be separated from their host noun phrases by extraposition or extraction, it is argued that they do not belong to the noun phrase syntactically, as discontinuity is vital in determining the constituency boundaries. The idea that attributive prepositional phrases are really independent clause-level modifiers goes counter to what is generally assumed in most syntactic frameworks, but it can be shown that the arguments that are traditionally given in favour of shared constituency do not adequately distinguish between syntactic, semantic and pragmatic association between language units. The layered structure of the FDG model, on the other hand, makes it possible to tease those different types of association apart, so that we can recognise the semantic link at the Representation Level, while at the same time accounting for the loose syntactic connection between the noun and the prepositional phrase at the Morphosyntactic Level.