300 Ahmed Moutaouakil
jected onto the discourse level, I will push a step forward the structural
parallelism hypothesis advocated in earlier works (Rijkhoff 1992, Mou-
taouakil 1993) by assuming that the different discourse categories (from
word to text) can be said to be underlain, although with various degrees of
surface explicitness, by one and the same archetypal, hierarchically organ-
ized structure whose (quantitative and/or qualitative) actual realization is
regulated by structural and typological parameters. It will be hypothesized,
in line with Moutaouakil (1999), that the representation of this structure
can be perfectly ‘transmodular’ in the sense that its different parts (i.e.
levels and layers) can be represented in separate but interacting modules.
- Discourse and Discourse Categories
The claim that will be advocated here presupposes a re-examination of the
notion ‘discourse’ as well as the notion ‘discourse categories’.
2.1. On defining discourse
As is well known, discourse is one of the notions that are used rather
polysemically in the linguistic (and the paralinguistic) literature. I do not
intend, here, to explore the different meanings that the term ‘discourse’
covers in traditional and modern linguistic theories. Rather I will restrict
myself to the use of this term within the FG community. According to
Mackenzie and Keizer (1991), ‘discourse’ is understood in two main ways:
it may be seen as (a) the product of text-creating activity, or (b) the ongo-
ing text-creating process itself. They rightly point out that FG takes the
former view, and in current FG literature ‘discourse’ is indeed being used
primarily to refer to supra-sentential (textual) stretches (cf. Dik 1997b:
379).
In the remainder of this chapter, I adopt the ‘product of text-creating ac-
tivity’ view but with the difference that I suggest that we call ‘discourse’
any ‘complete communicative unit’, i.e. any utterance fulfilling a commu-
nicative purpose in a given setting or, in other words, any utterance with
both a content and a communicative intention. According to this concep-
tion, any utterance (be it a single word or a mere interjection) can be taken
as a discourse if and only if it serves to achieve a certain communicative
goal, whatever its length, as we will see below.