278 Jan Nuyts
communicative situation. Secondly, the most important basic functionalist
principle (also a standard assumption in language psychology, cf. Bock et
al. 1992, Bock and Levelt 1994) is the implausibility of transformational
operations in a grammar. In this vein, the linguistic variants in semantic
paradigms are so fundamentally different that they cannot be derived from
each other in the grammar. Consequently, none of the variants can be used
to represent the basic semantic category. This unavoidably leads to the con-
clusion that the semantic category must have a format different from its
linguistic realizations.
The implications of all this go further than just the claim that conceptu-
alization is non-lexical (i.e. that it does not use lexical elements occurring
in natural languages). It also extends to the claim that its principles of or-
ganization are fundamentally different from linguistico-semantic organ-
ization. Thus, even a model such as Jackendoff’s (1983, 1987, 1990) Con-
ceptual Semantics – which postulates conceptual structures which are non-
lexical yet still strongly language-bound, i.e. based on the principle of
predicate-argument organization – faces problems with semantic para-
digms such as those mentioned above (Nuyts 2001a: 296ff.).
None of this should come as a surprise to functionalist researchers: The
functional requirements for a central information processing and storage
system, which conceptualization is, are completely different from the func-
tional requirements of a communication system such as language. So it is
only natural that they should have a completely different shape and organi-
zation.^4
- Layering is a conceptual, but not a linguistic phenomenon
If conceptualization is non-linguistic, what does it look like? There is no
full-blown answer at present, but the evidence mentioned in Section 2 does
uncover at least one major property of conceptualization: it must be lay-
ered. In fact, the argument in Section 2 simultaneously forces one to
conclude that notions such as epistemic modality are not specifically lin-
guistic, but basically conceptual (Nuyts 2001a). And this reasoning applies
in equal measure to other qualificational categories (most of which also in-
volve ‘semantic paradigms’), and by extension to the principle that there is
relative semantic scope between all these qualificational categories, which
is at the heart of the concept of layered representation in FG.
Perfectly in line with this conclusion is the observation (Nuyts 1998)
that there is a ‘mismatch’ (albeit one clearly motivated by functional prin-