Enation and agnation in multi-level models

Abstract

Gleason’s (1965) distinction between enation (same structure, different lexemes) and agnation (different structure, same lexemes) has proved to be a crucial one for theoretical linguistics, and over the last decades functional and cognitive linguists have made important contributions to the study of (in particular) agnate relations. Nevertheless, several issues have not yet been sufficiently investigated, including the identification of less obvious agnate relations; the exact characterization of identical, similar or overlapping relations at different levels of linguistic analysis; and the role of different kinds of function words in distinguishing between enation and agnation. In this paper I argue that the distinctive features of Functional Discourse Grammar (FDG) make this theory ideally suited to address these issues.