A New Architecture for Functional Grammar (Functional Grammar Series)

The question of discourse representation 97

Table 1. An illustration of Steuten's method of discourse representation

COMMUNICATIVE UNIT

GRAMMATICAL

UNIT

Level 1:

Transaction

Level 2:

Exchange

Level 3:

Interactional Act

Level 4:

Illocutionary Act

Opening Greeting 1

Greeting 2

Information Question 3

Conversation Answer 4, 5

Reaction 6

Closing Valediction 7

Valediction 8

Non-linguistic

Part

RELATION

NUCLEUS

SATELLITE

elaboration

proposition 1

proposition 2

Figure 2. Outline of an RST-style discourse representation

Vet (1998a), working within the framework of Modular Functional
Grammar, distinguishes between the speech act and the utterance which
constitutes the product of that act. The structure of an utterance is exempli-
fied in the following, where ‘u’ stands for ‘utterance’, ‘c’ for the ‘content’
of that utterance, ‘POS’ for the truth-value ‘positive’ and ‘p’ for ‘proposi-
tional content’:

(3) a. Jay likes Kay.
b. u 1 : [DECL (c 1 : [POS p 1 : [Pres e 1 : [likeV (d1x 1 : JayN (x 1 ))ZeroSubj
(d1x 2 : KayN (x 2 ))RefObj] (e 1 )] (p 1 )] (c 1 ))] (u 1 )

Such a characterization belongs to the grammatical module. In the prag-
matic module, on the other hand, Vet accommodates the discourse activity,
together with the mental considerations which motivate it. For instance,
take the sequence: