Functional generative description (FGD) is a linguistic framework developed at

Charles University in Prague Charles University ( cs, Univerzita Karlova, UK; la, Universitas Carolina; german: Karls-Universität), also known as Charles University in Prague or historically as the University of Prague ( la, Universitas Pragensis, links=no), is the oldest an ...

since the 1960s by a team led by

Petr Sgall Petr Sgall (27 May 1926 – 28 May 2019) was a Czech linguist. He specialized in dependency grammar, topic–focus articulation and Common Czech. Biography Sgall was born on 27 May 1926 in České Budějovice. His father was an attorney and a ...

. Based on the

dependency grammar Dependency grammar (DG) is a class of modern grammatical theories that are all based on the dependency relation (as opposed to the ''constituency relation'' of phrase structure) and that can be traced back primarily to the work of Lucien Tesni� ...

formalism, it is a stratificational grammar formalism that treats the sentence as a system of interlinked layers:

phonological Phonology is the branch of linguistics that studies how languages or dialects systematically organize their sounds or, for sign languages, their constituent parts of signs. The term can also refer specifically to the sound or sign system of a ...

, morphematical,

morphonological Morphophonology (also morphophonemics or morphonology) is the branch of linguistics that studies the interaction between morphological and phonological or phonetic processes. Its chief focus is the sound changes that take place in morphemes (mi ...

, analytical ( surface syntax) and tectogrammatical ( deep syntax). Continuing the tradition of

Prague School The Prague school or Prague linguistic circle is a language and literature society. It started in 1926 as a group of linguists, philologists and literary critics in Prague. Its proponents developed methods of structuralist literary analysis an ...

, special attention is paid to the phenomenon of

topic–focus articulation In linguistics, the topic, or theme, of a sentence is what is being talked about, and the comment (rheme or focus) is what is being said about the topic. This division into old vs. new content is called information structure. It is generally a ...

. The Prague Dependency Treebank (PDT) is a

treebank In linguistics, a treebank is a parsed text corpus that annotates syntactic or semantic sentence structure. The construction of parsed corpora in the early 1990s revolutionized computational linguistics, which benefitted from large-scale empiri ...

consisting of a subset of the

Czech National Corpus The Czech National Corpus (CNC) (Czech : Český národní korpus) is a large electronic corpus of written and spoken Czech language, developed by the Institute of the Czech National Corpus (ICNC) in the Faculty of Arts at Charles University in Pra ...

annotated along the lines of FGD.

References

* Sgall, P., Hajičová, E., Panevová, J. (1986). ''The Meaning of the Sentence in Its Semantic and Pragmatic Aspects''. Dordrecht: D. Reidel Publishing Company. .

External links

Prague Dependency Treebank 2.0

Prague Dependency Treebank 2.5
Prague linguistic circle Semantics Dependency grammar {{semantics-stub