The school of 

Danish functional linguistics (DFL) was developed in an attempt to combine

modern functional grammar and cognitive linguistics with the best ideas and concepts of
the earlier structuralist school. Like Hjelmslev and Saussure, the approach insists on the
basic structural division of communication in planes of content and expression. [4] Like
Simon Dik and functionalist grammarians, Danish functionalists also insist that language
is fundamentally a means of communication between humans and is best understood
and analysed through its communicative function. When analysing linguistic utterances,
the content and expression planes are analysed separately, with the expression plane
being analysed through traditional structural methods and the content plane being
analysed mostly through methods from semantics and pragmatics. However, it is assumed
that structures on the expression plane mirror structures on the content plane. This can
be seen in the parallelism between the structure of Danish sentences as described by
the structural syntactic model of Paul Diderichsen dividing utterances into three basic
fields: a foundation field, a nexus field and a content field; and the pragmatic structure
of utterances that often uses the foundation field for discourse pragmatic functions, the
nexus field for illocutionary functions and the content field for the linguistic message.
Danish functionalists assume that an utterance is not to be analysed from the minimal
units and up, but rather from the maximal units and down, because speakers begin the
construction of utterances by choosing what to say in a given situation, then by
choosing the words to use and finally by building the sentence by means of sounds.
An example of a two planed analysis is given below in the analysis of the utterance "The
book hasn't been read by anyone for a while". The Expression plane consists of "the
book" which is a noun phrase with a determiner, a finite verb with a negational adverb
"hasn't", and a passive verbal phrase "been read" with an agent "by anyone" and a time
adverb "for a while". On the content plane "the book" has the function of topic of the
utterance, that which the sentence is about and which links it to the larger discourse, the
function of "hasn't" is to state the illocutionary force of the declarative utterance, and
the predicate is the message "hasn't been read by anyone for a while" which is intended
to be communicated.