Behind the scenes: Cognition and Functional
Discourse Grammar
Carlos Inchaurralde
- Introduction
Psychological adequacy has always been a claim of Functional Grammar
(Dik 1989: 13), but it has always been problematical in its application (cf.
Butler 1991, 1999; Hesp 1990a, 1990b; Nuyts 1990, 1992: 223–236).
Hengeveld (this volume) faces some aspects of the problem and describes a
new architecture for a Functional Discourse Grammar (FDG), in which a
top-down model is adopted and communicative decisions precede represen-
tations. This model is coherent with the findings of Levelt (1989) and other
psycholinguists, according to whom the speech production process runs from
intention to articulation. This is fine as far as production is concerned, but we
should not forget that in linguistic interaction there is decoding as well as en-
coding. The production model describes the process from the communicative
intention to the message. However, there is also a reception process on the
hearer’s part, in which the message comes first, and from which both the
content and the communicative intention are obtained. In the pages below I
will try to show how both processes can be integrated into a single model
that preserves the architecture proposed by Hengeveld.
- Modularity of the mind: different kinds of storage
Cognition plays an important role in the FDG model as a specific compo-
nent that interacts with the interpersonal, representational, and expression
levels, which have a hierarchical structure.^1 The interpersonal level is
linked to the representational level, and the interpersonal and representa-