Functional generative description

The Functional Generative Description ( FGD, English Functional Generative Description) is a linguistic formalism which was designed in the 1960s by Petr Sgall and further developed in the following decades. She is assigned to the field of functional grammar. At the beginning of the FGD was based on Chomsky's context-free grammar, now is the formalism based on a dependency grammar. The FGD linked in many aspects to the theses of the Prague school, but at the same time takes into account the latest developments in the field of computational linguistics. The Saussure'sche distinction signifiant / signifie reflected in the FGD in distinguishing form vs. Function down. The FGD is a Strafikationsgrammatik, there are five linguistic description levels: phonological, morphematische, morphonological, analytical and tektogrammatische. To put it simply, that there are at each level two types of units that are in a compositional relationship, the entity that represents a function that is seen on the immediately higher-lying level form. It was long disputed whether the level of analysis is necessary.

As part of the FGD and the current rate structure is observed, which is important in distinguishing the rule. Thus, the following two sentences are not necessarily identical:

To avoid misunderstandings in the evaluation of grammaticality and meaning differences, the notion of strict equivalence was introduced:

• Two linguistic expressions are strictly equivalent if they have the same meaning in all contexts.

By this definition, the mode is verbi the German meaning distinctive, because the following two sets are not strictly equivalent, although they are displayed on the tektogrammatischen level by the same structure.:

Namely, there is at least one context in which the two sentences in meaning are not identical, and indeed if you like inserts the adverb.

On the FGD is largely developed at Charles University in Prague Dependenzkorpus (PDT, Prague Dependency Treebank English ). The formalism and the PDT found some use in some projects at the University of Saarland.

• Theoretical Linguistics