Functional Discourse Grammar #

Functional Discourse Grammar is normally used to describe the production of spoken language in a way that is comparable across widely differing languages. It could be valuable in helping to understand and describe how unsupervised algorithms used for language production and processing actually work.

FDG describes utterances as a through a combination of levels and layers. It generally describes it in terms of speech production - starting from the concept and progressing through the layers to articulation and output. It is claimed that the same structure should also apply in reverse during interpretation of speech, but this I have not seen this described in as much detail.

The four levels; Interpersonal, Representational, Morphosyntactic and Phonological consist of a nested structure of layers. Layers consist of ( operator, head, function?). Patterns exist within each level; frames at formulation levels, and templates at encoding levels.