Towards a speaker model of FG 347(12) ... A-nd .. he would come into cláss. [previously (11a)]
According to FDG, after the mental material for M 6 has been gathered,
the first step in this process will be the decision that this is going to be an
Informing move. Although Hengeveld (this volume) does not give an indi-
cation in this direction, we will assume that there will be an M operator
INFRM for this.^17 Then the Act is constructed. The illocution chosen is
DECL(arative), the default choice under the INFRM operator. It is fol-
lowed by the variables for the discourse participants PS and PA and the
actual Content C 6. Together this is a paraphrase of the intention ‘I tell you
that C 6 ’. C 6 will be filled in by a number of referring and ascriptive acts Ri
and Tj. The order in which this happens is determined by various compet-
ing pragmatic principles. Good candidates are Topic Continuity and Task
Urgency (Givón (ed.) 1983; Givón 1987, 1988). Both are scalar variables
which determine the formal expression of referring and property-assigning
entities in terms of constituent order and other devices, such as special con-
structions. Topic Continuity favours topical and other ‘old’ and
presupposed entities; Task Urgency favours focal and other ‘new’ and un-
predictable entities. For our discussion, our point of departure is that these
forces work on the interpersonal level, above all in determining the order in
which referring and ascribing acts take place. This pragmatically deter-
mined ‘underlying’ order is reflected only indirectly in the final syntactic
constituent order. It is reflected in the availability at the RL level and the
constituent-order rules of the language concerned.
More concretely, Topic Continuity, Task Urgency and possibly other
forces determine the order in which the respective Ris and Tjs will enter C 6.
In the case of (12) the unmarked surface form is an indication that three
elements have been entered into C 6 initially, and probably in the (default)
order Topical > Focal: the topical referent for the teacher (R 1 ); the focal
referent for the notion CLASS (R 2 ); and the third element for the ascriptive
notion GO INTO (T 1 ).^18 In the case of R 1 , instead of an abstract predicate,
the existing discourse variable for the teacher, say x 1 , will represent the re-
ferring act. In the case of referents which are new to the discourse, new
variables are introduced. Something like the representation under (13) may
then be in working memory. Note that here and in later representations we
leave out bits of the FG formalisms that seem to be less relevant for our
discussion.