192 J. Lachlan Mackenzie
As was mentioned, the lexicon also recognizes the Agent of the eating as
an argument, which forms another, slightly less binding, constraint on the
speaker’s communicative intention as represented in the interactional
component:
(16) You EAT the grapes?
(17) (M1: (inquire A 1 : (SA1.1: (T: EAT)Foc), (SA1.2: (R: GRAPES)), (SA1.3
(R: ADDRESSEE))))
Finally, the representational component of English has rules regarding the
finiteness of propositions and the tense of predications which can also be
imposed upon the translation of the intention into expression. It is these
that are involved in the production of (11). More precisely, both the struc-
ture (17) and a representational structure (18) in which the relevant
operators are specified will form the input to the expression rules:
(18) (finite p 1 : (past e 1 : (f 1 : eat [V] (d1x 1 : [-S, +A])AgSubj (d1x 2 : f 2 : grape [N])Go)))
The final structure of (11) results from the expression rules’ reacting to a
collaboration between the on-line interactional component and the declara-
tive representational component:
(a) the speaker decides to produce an act of inquiry;
(b) the speaker focuses this act on EAT, as shown in (12) above;
(c) this activates the lexical entry eat and implicates the representational
component, which (as ever) imposes finiteness, tense, valency and
syntactic function assignment;
(d) the speaker now starts to formulate the utterance, gradually enriching
the interactional representation to take account of the requirements of
the representational component:
i. did in utterance initial position helps to signal the act of in-
quiry (along with the intonation contour) and satisfies the
representational component’s demand for finiteness and tense;
ii. you satisfies the representational component’s demand for
valency and subject assignment;
iii. EAT, with tonic syllable, expresses the Focus of the utterance;
iv. the grapes satisfies the representational component’s demand
for valency.
All three possible formulations impart the Focus (diii); (14) arises from