Welcome!
I'm taking your questions to be about little-f functional grammars, as opposed to some particular theory called "Functional Phrase Structure Grammar" (which, if it exists, I don't know anything about). I hope that's your intention.
Please bare with me...my last class was decades ago...I use lessons learned to clarify points when I teach, and don't often get as far as my question....
With the sentence, "The girl eats the cookies", it can easily be analyzed as NP - V - NP --> NP - VP -->S.
This is standard with transitive verbs - yes?
With intransitive, the norm then is that the verb is followed by a PP, when verbiage follows. It that correct? (The girl runs to the corner store.) (NP - V - PP --> NP - VP --> S)
So, based upon those concepts, if one were to come across the sentence, "The girl cries.", there is an assumption that a PP has been omitted, because it is 'somehow' understood. Yes?
I'm not sure why you'd be looking for a prep phrase following "cries". Certainly intransitive VPs often contain PPs, but there's no requirement that they do. The girl can "run to the corner store", but she can also just "run". VP -> V PP, but also just VP -> V.
Now I'm off topic, sorry, but I am trying to update some exercises, and would like to be accurate.
When I show my students basic PSG theory, my objective is to make them better aware of the "job" words perform in sentences. I am prepping them for 101-type coursework, and find that clarifying functional parts of speech benefits them more than if I try to "pre-visit" the entire grammar handbook forced on American freshmen.
When faced with interrogatives that precede the body of a sentence - (Would you like to visit the pool?, Why are the students walking to the store?), how are the interrogatives factored into the tree?
Thanks.
Questions in English require more than just phrase structure. They require some mechanism of movement ("raising" specifically). Different models of grammar deal with this in different ways, but most functional grammars would describe a sentence's underlying structure *before* movement and then describe the rules for movement subsequently:
You are eating [what]? -> What are you eating?
The students are walking to the store [why]? -> Why are the students walking to the store?
The would-case is a little difference, since "would" isn't an interrogative but rather an auxiliary verb.
