292 Jan Nuyts
diary period of time at all. Similarly, one may wonder whether clearly
counterfactual information, i.e. information marked for ‘certainty that not’,
makes it into the long-term store of world knowledge, except for rare,
highly significant cases, such as ‘that job of a lifetime which one did not
get’.) Of course, even if the speaker’s knowledge about an SoA is certain,
if a hearer brings in an alternative view, the speaker is again forced to re-
calculate his/her view in function of what the hearer adds in terms of
background information for the SoA. Whatever the details, it is obvious
that it is precisely when talking about one’s commitment to an SoA – i.e.
precisely when epistemic or other attitudinal elements enter the grammar
— that the operational character of these high-level qualifications is cru-
cial. Yet, the grammar is hardly the place to handle those high-level
operations as such – in fact, it does not have the infrastructure for them.
- Conclusion
The point of this chapter can be summarized as follows. Linguistic theories
of grammar have always shown a tendency to deal with whatever they en-
counter in linguistic data in the grammar proper. As long as they deal with
structural phenomena, that is fine. But when they start dealing with seman-
tic and pragmatic phenomena, they quickly run into the problem of
overburdening the grammar with constructs which do not belong there, but
belong in other areas of cognition, such as conceptualization. That is, they
create grammars with an ‘overcapacity’. I suspect that the layered system
in FG – as well as the current tendency in FG to render discourse organiza-
tion in grammar – is a case in point.
Notes
- The same is probably true of understanding linguistic expressions. But I will
mainly adopt a production perspective here. - The arguments and views presented in this chapter are developed in much
more detail, and are moreover underpinned by substantial amounts of ex-
perimental and corpus data, in Nuyts (2001b). - I have elaborated the arguments for this assumption at length elsewhere
(Nuyts 1990, 2001a), so for reasons of space I will not repeat them here. - The foregoing actually does not imply that conceptualization must be imag-
istic (cf. Dik’s ‘perceptual representations’ or Jackendoff’s ‘3D
representations’). An action scene such as the ‘commercial event’ involves