320 Ahmed Moutaouakil
the main components and the organization of the communication event it-
self, which typically involves three operations: (a) representing some State
of Affairs occurring in some possible world and constituting the message
that S intends to communicate; (b) establishing relationships between S and
A on the one hand and between S and the content of this message on the
other; (c) choosing the discourse type and the discourse style in which (a)
and (b) are to be delivered. Secondly, from the FG point of view, the ac-
quisition of language is approached, as is pointed out in Dik (1997a: 7), in
terms of “its development in communicative interaction between the
maturing child and its environment”. Here again, the notion
‘communicative interaction’ is central. This would enable us to think of
ADS as representing a relatively advanced stage of the child’s progressive
mastery of linguistic communicative abilities. And thirdly, it becomes clear
from the facts discussed in the previous sub-sections that ADS can be
assumed to underlie, with quantitative and qualitative parametrical
variance, natural discourses of various categories, types and styles in
different types of languages (and probably all language types). Moreover,
if we are able to assume that any communicative process involves the three
levels of ADS, it becomes not unreasonable to hypothesize that a structure
with similar components and organization is also at work in non-verbal
(pictorial, musical,^3 etc.) communication systems.
In sum, ADS can be viewed as a universal structure in which language
types make quantitative and/or qualitative choices. In another, stronger
formulation, language types partially result from different choices in ADS.
Within each language type, the actualization of this structure is regulated
by further factors relating to discourse type, discourse style and discourse
category.
- Conclusions
One of the possible solutions that can be proposed to the problem of ex-
tending the current clause/sentence FG model and transforming it into a
more text-oriented model is built on four related assumptions that presup-
pose each other: (a) that the notion ‘discourse’ covers all kinds of
utterances expressing a complete communicative event, (b) that discourse
can be formally mediated through four formal categories: text, clause,
term-phrase and word (or perhaps five if we take sentence as a full-fledged
discourse category), (c) that these categories are underlain, at different de-
grees, by one and the same archetypal structure, and (d) that this