FDG and language production 183on their own. Nothing could be further from the truth”. Dik (1997a: 8)
similarly stresses that we are concerned with verbal interaction. At this
level conscious decisions are involved: not the choice whether to assign
Object function to a Recipient or not, but a split-second determination of
what move to make at a particular juncture in the joint activity of commu-
nication: to contest what the other has said, to crack a joke to defuse a
tricky situation, etc. The choice of move is a complex matter involving, as
discourse analysts have shown us, a number of goals at once, not least that
of keeping the conversation going in a mutually co-operative manner.
- Acts and subacts
Let us, with Hengeveld (this volume), take the speaker’s strategic move as
the point of departure for analysis. This ‘minimal free unit of discourse’
consists of a number (n ≥ 1) of acts. Under normal circumstances, their se-
quence in cognition will be reflected by their sequence in expression. In
this view, the schema Theme, Predication, Tail familiar from Dik’s early
work (1978: 130) will be reinterpreted as reflecting a single move consist-
ing of three acts: the Theme corresponds to an act that introduces a
discourse referent, the Predication to a cognitively subsequent proposition
involving that referent in some way, and the Tail to a final act, correcting
or amplifying the preceding act, possibly as a result of self-monitoring.
Each Act corresponds in principle to a single intonation unit, although
many extraneous factors may upset the biuniqueness. In a language like
English the intonation unit generally contains one particularly accented and
pitch-changing (tonic) syllable, which helps to mark a possible transition
point for the other conversation partners. This accented syllable is in most
cases also a guide to the communicatively most salient aspect of the act. In
FG this corresponds to the assignment of the pragmatic function Focus.
The Focus is thus the essential component of each act; i.e. there is no act,
no matter how brief, without a Focus.
Let us consider an utterance such as (1):
(1) Oh my God, it’s on fire, my hair.
This utterance will, let us assume, reflect one move by the speaker. The
utterance will most likely manifest three intonation contours, each with a
tonic syllable (God, fire, hair respectively). The move can correspondingly
be seen as containing three sequenced acts which rather naturally reflect