FG and the dynamics of discourse 215Also in this volume, Cornish, Inchaurralde and Hengeveld himself
stress the need for fleshing out the Cognition and Communicative Context
components of FDG, but without moving away from our main object of
study: the linguistic message. Of interest in this context is Mackenzie’s
(this volume) suggestion that the interaction and expression levels should
be viewed as incrementally operative in real time, while the representa-
tional level would act as a buffer between these two real-time processes,
serving to organize the material into linguistic form. Convergent with this
re-interpretative spirit and with the ongoing discussion on the discourse-
and cognitively oriented expansion of FG (and other approaches), I would
argue for an Incremental Discourse Cognitive Grammar (IDCG), as out-
lined in Figure 1 below.
Gathering inspiration from Hengeveld’s FDG, Nuyts’s FPG, Macken-
zie’s IFG, and cognitive grammar (CG; Langacker 1987, 1988, 2000,
2001b), IDCG pictures the connection between discourse expressions and
cognition as a dynamic real-time process in which information is incremen-
tally presented in coherent ‘packets’ of digestible size.
Broadly identifiable with intonation units,^4 information packets are rep-
resented as framed (or co(n)textually delimited) bi-dimensional events,
comprising both conceptualization (embracing IL and SL) and expression
(EL), each with various co-ordinated planes. EL includes discourse expres-
sions of all sorts, segmental, suprasegmental, and paralinguistic or kinesic.
Conceptualization incorporates the interlocutors’ apprehension of the
ground (including the speech event itself, the speaker (S) and addressee
(A), and their immediate spatio-temporal circumstances), on the one hand,
and the current discourse space (CDS), on the other, that is, the mental
space comprising the elements and relations construed as being shared by S
and A at a given moment in the flow of discourse. Therefore, in this model
CDS embodies speakers’ shared knowledge, which in turn includes the
context of speech involving physical, mental and socio-cultural variables.
At the centre of the speech context is the ground, where S and A are en-
gaged in a co-operative viewing of some facet of any world (real or
imagined).