Comment clauses and FDG 199- The grammar-coding perspective vs the intention-coding
perspective
Although the layout is well motivated in terms of adequacy from the dis-
course viewpoint, it raises a fundamental question of the natural
ontological relations between grammatical choices and communicative
choices. Should we expect the speaker’s ‘decision tree’ of communicative
choices in making an utterance to be identical to the decision tree of mak-
ing grammatical choices?
It is noteworthy that over the past decades, models of grammar, whether
generative or more functional, have become increasingly lexically based in
their descriptive procedure, with the verb as the central source of those de-
pendencies that determine grammatical options. This trend suggests that if
we want to describe how grammatical choices are structured, there are fac-
tors that favour beginning with lexical elements – rather than placing them
at the end of a long hierarchical procedure. On the other hand, it is natural
to assume that there is a form of isomorphism in the sense that unless the
speaker can adapt his choice process to the choices offered by the code, it
is difficult to see how he could produce adequate utterances. Slobin and
Berman’s ‘thinking-for-speaking’ research (cf. Slobin 1987; Berman and
Slobin 1994), although focusing on other aspects of the issue, also suggests
that we need to provide descriptions where the two sides match up.
Until we know more, however, a number of different solutions are
possible: apart from point-by-point matching of linguistic and communi-
cative choices, one might imagine a first phase of communicative choices
gradually blending into a later phase of coding choices, or a process in
which the interface between communicative aims and coding options is
present from the beginning until the end. For reasons described else-
where, I think the linguistic hierarchy has an inherent order which
reflects a stage of ‘compilation’ rather than ‘execution’, or ‘recipe’ rather
than ‘cooking’ (cf. Harder 1996: 214ff.), where you have to relate opera-
tors to operands before you can execute the program, in which case there
would always be a simultaneous bottom-up and top-down logic; cf. also
Fortescue (1992: 122) on the bottom-up ‘centrifugal principle’ that seems
to apply to expression rules.
Whatever the exact truth may be, I believe that an explicit grammar-
discourse interface is an advantage in a framework that seeks the integra-
tion of discourse into a functional linguistic theory; a point-by point
matching process would then not be excluded, but it would emerge as a
special case. I think such a model would be in keeping with the central part