ABSTRACT
Chapter 2 presents the theoretical and descriptive linguistic foundation of the Register-Functional (RF) approach to grammatical complexity. The chapter begins by surveying previous approaches to grammatical complexity, both in theoretical linguistics and applied linguistics. Then, building on that background, the chapter motivates the need for a new approach, outlines the main characteristics of the RF framework, and discusses how the approach addresses the gaps in previous research. Chapter 2 additionally provides considerable background information about the RF approach, including an overview of the inventory of structural types and syntactic functions in RF studies, and a relatively detailed discussion of the historical antecedents of the RF approach. In particular, the chapter discusses how research studies in the RF approach build on three major lines of previous research: Multi-Dimensional studies of register variation; the research findings on lexico-grammar in spoken and written registers contained in the Longman Grammar of Spoken and Written English; and the theoretical approach to register variation referred to as the Text-Linguistic (TxtLx) framework.
