Remarks on layering 289memory, and in some respects it already adapts conceptual structures to the
process of language production.^19 Unfortunately, going further into this
debate would lead me too far astray from my present concern with layering
(but see De Schutter and Nuyts 1983, Nuyts 2001a: 273ff).^20
- A few more thoughts about conceptual layering
Let me briefly make a few more final observations pertaining to the status
of qualifications – and especially the high-level, attitudinal ones – in con-
ceptualization, which reveal complexities of the issue of layering which
clearly extend far beyond what belongs in a linguistic grammar.
5.1. Control
If attitudinal qualifications (like speech acts) are ‘performed’ (see Section
4.4), what is it that ‘performs’ them? If climbing up the qualificational hi-
erarchy involves an increasing role for creative involvement of the speaker
(see Section 3.1), what causes that involvement? If attitudinal qualifica-
tions all involve an explicit statement about types of speaker commitment
to the SoA, and can be expressed with or without speaker commitment to
the qualification itself (the performativity vs descriptivity issue – see note
16), where does that commitment come from? All these questions strongly
point in the direction of a concept which has a long tradition in AI but
which apparently must be assumed in cognitive theories of natural intelli-
gence as well: they all suggest the existence of a ‘control unit’ which
steers, coordinates and supervises at least some of the operations of the
cognitive system. And this no doubt includes in a quite direct way the op-
erations leading to attitudinal qualifications of information about the world
(SoAs): they result from the control system’s evaluative comparison of the
chunk of knowledge (the SoA) that is to be qualified to other knowledge
stored somewhere in the conceptual system. This is not the context in
which to elaborate much on this notion of control and its implications (for
discussion of its links to other highly interesting notions such as con-
sciousness and attention see Nuyts 1992a, 2001a: 357ff.). But it is well
known that this element has pervasive effects on all kinds of perceptive and
behavioural systems in human cognition, witness the continuing discus-
sions about automaticity vs control in many areas of cognitive processing.
As such, it stands beyond all those individual cognitive systems, including
the linguistic. But if attitudinal qualifications are so closely linked to the