310 Ahmed Moutaouakil
operate on. On the other hand, according to a recent tendency (cf. Kroon
1997, Bolkestein 1998, Vet 1998, Van den Berg 1998, Liedtke 1998), a
separate module should be added to the MNLU. In fact, I think that there is
some ambiguity on the nature and the function of this additional module,
probably attributable to the fact that ‘discourse’ and ‘pragmatics’ are not
always systematically differentiated. In Kroon’s view, it is conceived of, as
far as I can judge, as a ‘discourse module’ (a text module in our terminol-
ogy) intended to handle supra-sentential phenomena. In this sense, it stands
in contrast with a ‘sentence module’ whose task it is to take care of prop-
erly intra-sentential phenomena. In Vet’s view, the added module is quite
different. It is a pragmatic module intended to deal with the contextually
determined properties of linguistic expressions – whatever their length, and
even extending to whole texts) – and in particular with speech acts (or non-
literal illocutions).
In Moutaouakil (1999), a proposal along the lines of Vet’s view is made
which can be further developed as follows. We can say that the two repre-
sentational procedures described above are theoretically equivalent in the
sense that they both fit in with the principles and the organization of FG. It
is clear that the definition and the categorization of discourse opted for
here, in particular when viewed in the light of GPH, leave no room for the
distinction between a ‘discourse (or text) module’ and a ‘sentence module’.
All the discourse categories distinguished in hierarchy (2) (or hierarchy
(6)) are dealt with in the same way, according to either the unified or the
modular procedure. In the latter case, once the added module is understood
as a pragmatic (and not exclusively a textual) module, the opposition be-
tween ‘upward layering’ and modularity is neutralized and the two
approaches can thus go perfectly hand in hand.
Two kinds of organization of the MNLU are possible. In one of these,
two modules contribute together to taking care of the relevant underlying
properties of any complete communicative unit whatever its category (text,
clause, term-phrase etc.). In the grammatical module, a (grammatical) un-
derlying structure represents the semantic and structural features, whereas
in the pragmatic module (in the sense of Vet) a (pragmatic) underlying
structure encodes the contextual speaker-oriented features such as illocu-
tionary force, subjective modality and pragmatic functions. These two
underlying structures are taken together as inputs, possibly with underlying
structures from other (epistemic, logical, social etc.) modules, to expres-
sion rules which deliver the final syntactic form.