Layers and Operators Revisited

Perhaps Functional Grammar’s most distinctive feature is its extensive use of the so-called layered structure of the clause (LSC). The LSC is used as both a descriptive and explanatory construct, dividing the linguistic world into various hierarchically related layers, each with concomitant operators and satellites. Since Hengeveld’s original Layers and Operators article (1989), the principle of layering has come to permeate the entire grammatical model. For instance, Rijkhoff (1992) explores the application of layering to referring terms, noting the parallelism in this regard between the layering of terms and predicates. However, there are two outstanding issues with respect to layering in FG: the positional problem and the typological problem.