302 Ahmed Moutaouakil
And perfect communication can take place with one-constituent utter-
ances such as the following:
(4) a. Some tea!
b. Cheers!
As shown in Moutaouakil (1993, 1996) and extensively demonstrated in
Mackenzie (1998), ‘holophrastic’ constructions like (4a–b), contrary to
what is commonly asserted, are complete stretches of discourse rather than
reduced sentences.
In sum, Clause, Term-phrase and Word may display two different uses:
‘integrated’ and ‘free’ uses. In the former case, they organizationally func-
tion as shown in hierarchy (2); in the latter case, they behave as
autonomous complete discourse units. It will be shown in Section 3 that the
difference between the two uses is reflected in the internal structure of
these discourse categories.
A third preliminary remark concerns a particular type of constructions
referred to as ‘Extraclausal constituent + Clause’ constructions in FG. Here
are some illustrative examples :
(5) a. Mary, can you help me?
b. Well, we can now continue the lecture.
c. As for John, he will come tomorrow.
d. She is a nice girl, your neighbour.
The problem constructions like (5a–d) pose relates to their status. In this
respect, two approaches can, it seems to me, be suggested. First, one can
conceive of the construction at hand as a distinct full-fledged discourse
category which one may call ‘Expression’ (Cuvalay 1997) or ‘Sentence’
(Moutaouakil 1988, Dik 1997b). This is indeed, as far as I know, the posi-
tion commonly taken so far in the FG community (cf. Dik 1978, 1989,
1997b; Moutaouakil 1988, 1989, 1998; Cuvalay 1997, among others). If
one adopts this approach, one can position this discourse category ‘Sen-
tence’ between text and clause, as a supra-clausal entity, which yields the
following alternative DCH:
(6) Discourse Categories Hierarchy (DCH)
Text > Sentence > Clause > Term-phrase > Word