282 Jan Nuyts
In terms of this kind of reasoning, then, one arrives at the – very incom-
plete^10 –^ gradual conceptual hierarchy of qualifications in (4):
(4) evidentiality
epistemic modality
deontic modality
time
quantificational aspect
qualificational aspect
state of affairs
This hierarchy (and hence the linguistic-semantic observations on which it
is based) is clearly not accidental or arbitrary: there is a straightforward
deeper rationale behind it, which ties in with very basic aspects of human
cognitive functioning. (This rationale is implicitly or subliminally con-
tained in, or closely approximated by, some aspects of the motivation for
the layered system in FG, but it got blurred in the FG account due to the
interference of other dimensions which are irrelevant at a conceptual level;
see Section 4.4 below.) Climbing up the cline in (4) correlates with a grad-
ual widening of the perspective on the State of Affairs (henceforth SoA).
The cline develops from, at the lower end, qualifications which further
specify internal features of the SoA, to, at the higher end, qualifications
which provide a global assessment of the status of the SoA. Correspond-
ingly, qualifications low in the system require no or hardly any information
other than knowledge of the SoA itself, while qualifications high in the
system are predominantly or exclusively based on information external to
the SoA. In even more basic terms, the system relates to the tension be-
tween perception and interpretation in cognitive functioning. Climbing up
the system in a way involves a decreasing role for direct perception of the
SoA, and an increasing role for interpretation and creative involvement on
the part of the speaker. In principle, the basic level of the conceptual repre-
sentation of the SoA is closest to, i.e. has been acquired through or should
be accessible for, direct perception of the world. Any instance of percep-
tion is obviously necessarily local, restricted to what is within the direct
reach of the perceptive system (whichever is involved) at one point in time.
The higher one climbs up in the hierarchy, the more the qualifications ap-
pear to be concerned with specifying aspects of this SoA which are beyond
the locality of immediate perception, and are thus dependent on, or aim at,
abstraction and generalization, and/or on perceptions or information out-
side the SoA proper.