Preface ixinterpersonal component analyses the Move as a sequence of Acts, each of
which is composed of temporally successive Subacts. The role of the repre-
sentational component, in this view, is that of a declarative grammar,
providing semantic frames which organize focal and topical units into pro-
positional form.
Peter Harder, of the University of Copenhagen (Denmark), welcomes
Hengeveld’s three-tier model, sharing Fortescue’s view that we need to
recognize both the ‘cooking’ and the ‘recipe’, as Harder has it, even at the
cost of a certain duplication of information. He concentrates on construc-
tions in which there is a mismatch between the two, with especial reference
to cases where the main clause serves to ‘hedge’ the content of the subor-
dinate clause, as in I'm afraid John is ill.
In the chapter by María de los Ángeles Gómez-González, of the Univer-
sity of Santiago de Compostela (Galicia, Spain), it is again FDG’s potential
for treating the dynamics of discourse and of clause construction that is
central. She confronts Hengeveld’s proposals with other recent develop-
ments in cognitively oriented linguistics, bringing them together in her
model of Incremental Discourse Cognitive Grammar. She shows how
clauses with complex beginnings result from the speaker’s incremental
manipulation of the addressee’s focus of attention.
Modality has long been a crucial issue in FG. Its treatment in FDG is
the subject of the contribution by Jean-Christophe Verstraete, of the Uni-
versity of Leuven (Belgium). The chapter concludes that the new
architecture offers an improvement in this respect, allowing – as Ver-
straete’s new data demand – a four-way distinction such that both
epistemic and deontic modality (analysed as tensed and tenseless at the
representational level) can be either subjective (located at the interpersonal
level) or objective (and located at the representational level).
The ambition of a Functional Discourse Grammar is comparable in
many ways to the scope of Functional Procedural Grammar as developed
by Jan Nuyts, of the University of Antwerp (Belgium). In a chapter which
shares Verstraete’s concern with modality, he provides a critical review of
FDG, arguing that layering is properly situated in cognition, and not in the
grammar itself. Nuyts asks grammarian to be content with dealing with
grammatically coded distinctions, and not to dabble in the study of concep-
tualization, which is non-linguistic, but hierarchical.
Directly opposed to such functional minimalism, as Fortescue calls his
analogous proposal, is the contribution by Ahmed Moutaouakil (University
of Rabat, Morocco), who argues for an expansion of the layering principle
upwards into the structure of discourse and downwards into the inner struc-