98 John Connolly
(4) Jay likes Kay. He dates her.
The account of this in the pragmatic module would be something like that
shown in Figure 3:
MOVE M 1 : (S) WANT ((S) INFORM (A) OF (R))
E 1 E 2ASSERT (S)(m 1 )(A) ASSERT (S)(m 2 )(A)LIKE (JAY, KAY) DATE (JAY, KAY)[L] [L]m' 1 m' 2WANT (S) (S inform A of the romantic association between Jay and Kay)
Figure 3. Example of Vet’s style of discourse representation
This can be interpreted as follows. The desire which S has to pass on to
A the information about Jay and Kay’s relationship (R) leads S to make a
discourse move M 1 , which is split into two speech acts, E 1 and E 2 , which
are intended to transmit messages m 1 and m 2 respectively to A. In the case
of m 1 the conceptual content of the message is represented as LIKE (JAY,
KAY). This is expressed in the form of actual language by means of a
function denoted as L, which encapsulates the choices made by S in order
to put the content of the message into words. The output of L is denoted as
m' 1 , which represents the conceptual content of m 1 together with the
choices just mentioned. Finally, m' 1 gives rise to u 1 (whose internal details
were set out earlier), which is the underlying linguistic form of the utter-
ance that expresses the content concerned. In this way, the function L
manages the interface between the pragmatic and grammatical modules.
This principle is encapsulated within the condensed formula given by Vet
(1998a: 12), namely L(m 1 ) = u 1.
Vet’s proposals are expanded and slightly modified by Connolly (1998),
who elaborates the representation of the discourse move to include the be-