Simon Cornelis Dik was a Dutch

Netherlands

The Netherlands is a constituent country of the Kingdom of the Netherlands, located mainly in North-West Europe and with several islands in the Caribbean. Mainland Netherlands borders the North Sea to the north and west, Belgium to the south, and Germany to the east, and shares maritime borders...

 linguist

Linguistics

Linguistics is the scientific study of human language. Linguistics can be broadly broken into three categories or subfields of study: language form, language meaning, and language in context....

, most famous for developing the theory of functional grammar

Functional grammar

Functional theories of grammar include a range of functionally based approaches to linguistics, the scientific study of language. The grammar model developed by Simon Dik bears this qualification in its name, functional grammar, as does Michael Halliday's systemic functional grammar.Role and...

. He occupied the chair of General Linguistics at University of Amsterdam between 1969 and 1994. During these 25 years he developed the theory of functional grammar, the foundations for which had been laid in his 1968 dissertation on coordination.

Two years before his death, Dik fell ill. As much as his illness allowed, he worked on developing his theory until his death. The second part of his work, The Theory of Functional Grammar, was published posthumously in 1997.

Selected publications

• The Theory of Functional Grammar (Part I: The Structure of the clause), 1989 ISBN 90-6765-432-9
• The Theory of Functional Grammar (Part II: Complex and Derived Constructions), 1997 ISBN 3-11-015404-8 (pt.I); ISBN 3-11-015403-X (pt.I paperback); ISBN 3-11-015406-4 (pt. II); ISBN 3-11-015405-6 (pt. II paperback)

External links

• Biography (Dutch)