Epilogue: dynamic morphosyntax in Functional Discourse Grammar

This epilogue addresses the most important topics and challenges for the Morphosyntactic Level in Functional Discourse Grammar that have been raised in the articles in this Special Issue. We begin by exploring the differences between the Morphosyntactic Level in FDG and the treatment of morphosyntactic phenomena in other linguistic frameworks. We then concentrate on the relevance of typological work to the construction of the formalism and to the organization of the Morphosyntactic Level. We conclude that one of its main advantages is its flexibility in accounting for the morphosyntactic diversity of the languages of the world. This flexibility is the result of three main aspects: the distinction between a configurational and a hierarchical ordering of units, the influence of external factors such as iconicity, domain integrity and functional stability, and compatibility with general observations on human language processing and production which result in a dynamic implementation of the Morphosyntactic Level.