82 Carlos Inchaurralde
essed at the same level by the receiver of the message (see Figure 2).
Level of transaction
Actual communication (Physical layer)
Figure 2. The encoding-decoding process
Now, since this procedure actually works in local area networks and is a
fine model of phenomena that take place in real language, we can adopt it
as a procedural basis for Hengeveld’s model. Let us have a look at some
examples. Let us imagine a Japanese businessman who is waiting for a su-
perior. When he meets him, he says:
(1) Aa, Tanaka-san desu ka. Omachi shite orimashita
‘Oh, Mr. Tanaka. (I) have been waiting (for you)’
The process that has taken place is as follows. First, he has to encode
his communicative intention. The cognitive component comes into action,
retrieving long-term information about communicative settings and the dif-
ferent possibilities available and also drawing information from the
communicative context. The interactants have a different relative position
on the social scale, and this fact should be encoded at the interpersonal
level. The ‘request’ that is sent to the first layer is formalized as follows:
(2) [A 1 : [DECL (P 1 = Low)Sp (P 2 = High)Addr (C 1 : [...] (C 1 ))] (A 1 )]
This level sends the ‘request’ to the next layer (= level in FDG), but appar-
ently it does not change the representation of the propositional content,