A New Architecture for Functional Grammar (Functional Grammar Series)

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Discourse structure, the generalized parallelism hypothesis, and FG 309

ganized layers may be distinguished, in descending order for the discourse
event, the discourse type and the discourse style. With the addition of this
level the full underlying discourse structure becomes something like (17):


(17) Archetypal Discourse Structure (ADS)


The main argument in favour of such an approach is that the three sub-
categories of SETTING codetermine, as mentioned above, the form as well
as the content of the subsequent discourse and should therefore be consid-
ered to function as operators just like the operators of the other, well
established layers. In the same vein, although it seems to be relatively less
easy to find linguistic expressions which function as discourse type or dis-
course style satellites, we cannot conclude that satellites of this kind do not
exist.^1 In any case, satellites are optional constituents and their existence
can therefore not be taken as a crucial defining feature of layerhood.
Dik (1997b) points out that the discourse decisions under discussion
here at hand are ‘global’ in the sense that they affect not a single clause but
rather a whole text. This means that the added rhetorical level – or at least
some of its layers – is typically a textual level. We will return to this issue
in Section 3, where we will discuss the parameters regulating the actualiza-
tion of structure (17).


3.3. Unified representation or modular representation


As regards the underlying representation of the discourse structure dis-
cussed above, we can opt for one of two procedures, which I propose to
label the ‘unified procedure’ and the ‘modular procedure’.
According to the procedure adopted so far in the FG tradition, all the
(semantic and pragmatic) properties are coded in the same underlying
structure, which is represented in the Grammatical Module of the Model of
Natural Language User (MNLU). It is this structure that Expression Rules


Rhetorical level [Ev-Op [Typ-Op [Sty-Op Sty-Sat] Typ-Sat] Ev-Sat]

Interpersonal
level

[Inter-Op [Ill-Op [Mod-Op Mod-Sat]Ill-Sat]Inter-Sat]

Representational
level

[Loc-Op[Quant-Op[Qual-Op [Nucleus] Qual-Sat]Quant-Sat]Loc-Sat]
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