FDG and language production 187The various elements in capital letters stand for activated emotions and
concepts; the operators in bold print indicate the type of act. As soon as the
process represented in (5) begins, the expression component is set into ac-
tion. This is in line with “a basic consensus in the language production
literature” (Levelt 1999: 88), namely the notion of incremental production.
This says “that the next processing component in the general flow of in-
formation can start working on the still incomplete output of the current
processor. A processing component will be triggered into action by any
fragment [Levelt’s emphasis] of its characteristic input. As a consequence
the various processing components are normally simultaneously active,
overlapping their processes as the tiles of a roof”.
Whereas simplex acts can be sent directly to the expression component
(as outlined above), complex acts call upon the declarative grammar, which
may be modelled much as is proposed in Hengeveld’s representational
component. There, the units corresponding to the various subacts, Focus
and non-Focus, will generally, as with A 2 in (5), be grouped around a
predicate into the familiar propositional form. The predicate is selected
from the Fund, i.e. the lexicon expanded by the various derivational proc-
esses permitted by the language. The selection of the predicate, i.e. of the
State of Affairs, may well reflect the speaker’s perspective upon her con-
ceptualization, as with the selection of buy versus sell for a commercial
transaction; the perspective may also manifest itself in syntactic function
assignment. As Levelt (1999: 91–92) points out, the perspective may be
influenced by pragmatic factors attributable to the ongoing discourse, but
the speaker does have some freedom in this regard.
- The representational and expression components
The entire layering system of the FG representational component now
comes into play, setting down the ground rules for the linguistic formula-
tion of the cognitive processes that are to be expressed. They form a
complex of constraints upon the translation of “intention into articulation”
(Hengeveld this volume), constraints that are partially universal and par-
tially language-specific. The universal constraints cover such matters as
argument structure, the ordering of semantic functions, the relative scope
of the layers; the language-specific constraints relate to the distribution of
information over operators and satellites, the presence or absence of tense,
of Subject assignment, of evidentiality, etc. Further constraints derive from
the Fund: certain predicates strongly impose a certain argument structure,