Over the last forty years, the functionalist approach to linguistic description and explanation has given rise to several major schools of thought that share tw

The ten papers in this volume focus on Subject and Theme. Theme began its life as a semantic notion in the work of Vilém Mathesius, while Subject has tradition

This book, a tribute to Angela Downing, consists of twenty papers taking a broadly functional perspective on language, with topics ranging from the general (gra

Functionalism, as characterized by Allen, (2007:254) "holds that linguistic structures can only be understood and explained with reference to the semantic and c