Discourse structure, the generalized parallelism hypothesis, and FG 303Second, a closer look at the pragmatic and structural properties of extra-
clausal constituents, as discussed in Dik (1997b), reveals that they are not
necessarily associated with clauses. Rather, they may co-occur with any
discourse category, i.e. with clauses or whole texts, but also with term-
phrases or words. Moreover, some extraclausal constituents seem to co-
occur only with discourse categories other than clauses. To take an exam-
ple, ‘topic shifters’, ‘push and pop markers’ and ‘finalizers’ typically
function as textual (more particularly conversational) discourse markers.
Within an approach that takes these facts into account, it becomes difficult
to speak of ‘Sentence’ as a distinct discourse category.
Leaving the question open, I will assume in the rest of this chapter that
both approaches are tenable and that hierarchies (2) and (6) are thus
equally relevant. For the sake of simplicity, however, I will refer by DCH
to hierarchy (2) rather than to hierarchy (6).
A fourth and final remark is that a text can be divided into sub-parts that
are commonly called, depending on the text type, ‘episodes’, ‘passages’,
‘moves, etc. Since these result from a strictly internal sub-categorization of
text and otherwise have no existence, these entities cannot be taken as full-
fledged discourse categories. That is why they are not mentioned in DCH.
- Discourse Structure
One of the recent tendencies in FG has been to try and establish a structural
parallelism between the different discourse categories. In the remainder of
this chapter, I will show that one of the logical endpoints of such a ten-
dency is the postulation of a universal abstract archetypal discourse
structure whose actualization in these discourse categories takes place ac-
cording to certain parameters.
3.1. Generalized Parallelism Hypothesis
By the ‘Generalized Parallelism Hypothesis’ (GPH), I refer to the assump-
tion that there is a certain structural parallelism between all the different
discourse categories discussed above. In the evolution of this idea, two
types of structural parallelism may be distinguished which are perceptible
in the last decade of FG work: a surface parallelism and an underlying par-
allelism.