304 Ahmed Moutaouakil
3.1.1. Surface structural parallelism
The source of the assumption that certain discourse categories display a
surface formal similarity can, in my opinion, be traced back to Dik's (1989)
formulation of ordering principles (especially the ‘Principle of Cross-
Domain Harmony’) which he conceives of as governing word order within
both the clause and the term-phrase.
In a similar vein, De Groot (1990) argues for an approach based on the
idea that word structure (mainly the position of affixes with respect to the
stem) can be described in the same way as clause structure, i.e. in terms of
placement rules, ordering principles and patterns.
3.1.2. Underlying structural parallelism
As for the assumption of underlying structural parallelism, we may say that
it has been developed and extended in three steps.
In his insightful work on the Noun Phrase, Rijkhoff (1992) puts forward
the idea that Predication and Term display a structural parallelism to the
extent that they both consist of three layers: a quality layer, a quantity layer
and a locality layer. According to Rijkhoff's analysis, the common structure
of Predication and Term can be represented as follows:
(7) [Loc-Op [Quant-Op [Qual-Op [Nucleus] Qual-Sat] Quant-Sat] Loc-Sat]
In Moutaouakil (1993), the parallelism assumption is pushed a step fur-
ther. Starting from constructions like (8a–b) and (9) whose peculiarity is to
exhibit modalized terms (i.e. terms with subjective, exclamative or voli-
tional modality), Moutaouakil observes that a parallelism can also be
established between the term and the layer at which this type of modality is
supposedly located, i.e. the proposition layer:
(8) a. French Marie travaille avec quel enthousiasme!
‘With what enthusiasm Mary works!’
b. What a nice girl I saw yesterday!
(9) a. Standard Moroccan Arabic kana l-marhumu kariman
was the blessed-nom generous-acc
‘The hopefully to-be-blessed was generous.’