290 Jan Nuyts
operations of this unit, then those qualifications (and the system they are
part of) can hardly be less independent of the various task-specific percep-
tual and behavioural systems, including the linguistic one.
5.2. An SoA is specified for all qualifications, conceptually, but not
linguistically
Speakers rarely mention more than one or a few qualifications of an SoA in
an utterance. But that does not mean they have no notion of the status of
that SoA in terms of all other qualificational dimensions. What is men-
tioned in a specific utterance is a matter of what is relevant for the hearer in
the very specific, local communicative situation. But knowing about an
SoA is not so local, of course: it means anchoring it in one’s long-term
knowledge about the world. In line with Chafe’s (1994: 129) adage that
“consciousness cannot function without being oriented in space, time, soci-
ety, and ongoing background events”, then, it is very plausible to assume
that for each SoA in conceptual knowledge all qualificational dimensions
in the layered system must be present and set for a certain value. Knowl-
edge about events and objects is probably not fully anchored in one’s
conceptual system until all dimensions of its status are clear, and if some of
those dimensions are not clear, the control unit will strive to resolve the
gaps as soon as possible. ‘Anchoring’ an SoA thus means knowing how it
relates to other conceptual information, its frequency (aspect), its spatial
and temporal situation, its social value (deontic modality), its reality status
(epistemic modality), and how one got to know about it (evidentiality). Of
course, there is no reason to burden the linguistic system with this: gram-
mar only needs to deal with what actually appears in the linguistic
expression.
5.3. Qualifications as representations and as operations
In grammar, a qualificational expression is unavoidably always a (lexical)
label, a representation. To be sure, it is processed in grammar, but even in
that process it remains a label: grammar processes lexical elements, and
those are representational things. Conceptually, however, giving qualifica-
tion the status of a label or a representation will not do: as is implied in
Section 5.1, qualifying something is an operation, a process. The matter is
complicated, however. Let me lift a corner of the veil.
A few times, I have mentioned the distinction between performative and
descriptive uses of expressions of high-level qualifications such as epis-
temic modality. In conceptual terms, the difference can be stated as