christopher s. butler structure and function a

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Structure and FunctionA Guide to Three Major Structural-Functional Theories: Part 2


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Studies in Language Companion Series (SLCS)

The SLCS series has been established as a companion series to Studies in Language ,International Journal, sponsored by the Foundation “Foundations of Language”.

Series Editors

Werner AbrahamUniversity of Vienna

Michael NoonanUniversity of Wisconsin, Milwaukee

Editorial Board

Joan BybeeUniversity of New Mexico

Ulrike ClaudiUniversity of Cologne

Bernard ComrieMax Planck Institute

For Evolutionary Anthropology, Leipzig

William CroftUniversity of Manchester

Östen DahlUniversity of Stockholm

Gerrit DimmendaalUniversity of Leiden

Martin HaspelmathMax Planck Institute

For Evolutionary Anthropology, Leipzig

Ekkehard KönigFree University of Berlin

Christian LehmannUniversity of Erfurt

Robert LongacreUniversity of Texas, Arlington

Brian MacWhinney Carnegie-Mellon University

Marianne MithunUniversity of California, Santa Barbara

Edith Moravcsik University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee

Masayoshi ShibataniRice University and Kobe University

Russell TomlinUniversity of Oregon

† John Verhaar

The Hague

Volume 64

Structure and Function: A Guide to Three Major Structural-FunctionalTheories: Part 2: From clause to discourse and beyond

by Christopher S. Butler


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Structure and Function:

A Guide to Three Major

Structural-Functional Theories

Part 2: From clause to discourse and beyond

Christopher S. Butler

Honorary Professor, University of Wales Swansea

John Benjamins Publishing Company

Amsterdam

/

Philadelphia


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The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements 8

TM

of American National Standard for Information Sciences – Permanenceof Paper for Printed Library Materials, ansi z39.48-1984.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Butler, C.S.Structure and function: a guide to three major structural-functional

theories / Chris Butler.p. cm. (Studies in Language Companion Series, issn 0165–7763 ; v.63–64

In English, with examples in Dutch, English, Gunian, and Spanish.Includes bibliographical references and index.

Contents: v.1. Approaches to the simple clause -- v.2. From clause todiscourse and beyond.

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Table of contents

Acknowledgments ix

Preface xi

Chapter 1

Illocution and related phenomena 1

1.1 Introduction 11.2 Illocution in Functional Grammar 1

1.2.1 Dik’s view of illocution 11.2.2 Alternative views of illocution in FG 8

1.3 Illocution in Role and Reference Grammar 29

1.4 Illocution in Systemic Functional Grammar 301.4.1 Speech function and mood in the Sydney grammar 301.4.2 Mood and speech function in languages other than English 431.4.3 Illocution and mood in the Cardiff grammar 451.4.4 Other systemically-oriented approaches 52

1.5 Comparison of approaches 561.5.1 Basic and non-basic illocutions 561.5.2 Illocution and layering 561.5.3 The treatment of indirect illocutions: The contributions of

grammar and pragmatics 571.5.4 Typological perspectives 59

Chapter 2

Information structure 61

2.1 Introduction 612.2 Information structure in Functional Grammar 61

2.2.1 Dik’s account of pragmatic functions 61

2.2.2 Other accounts of pragmatic functions in FG 802.2.3 Voice in FG 99


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Table of contents

2.3 Information structure in the simplex clause in Role and ReferenceGrammar 1012.3.1 Introduction: The nature of informativity 1012.3.2

Pragmatic presupposition, topic and focus 102

2.3.3 Types of focus 1032.3.4 The coding of focus 1062.3.5 Focus and the scope of negation and quantification 1072.3.6 Focus and pronominalisation 1072.3.7 Focus structure and linking 1082.3.8 Voice in RRG 1102.3.9 Problems and extensions 111

2.4 Information structure in Systemic Functional Grammar 113

2.4.1 Information structure in the Sydney grammar 1132.4.2 Information structure in the Cardiff grammar 1502.5 Comparison of approaches 156

2.5.1 Topicality and focality 1572.5.2 An alternative perspective: The importance of position in the

clause as an indicator of informational status 1712.5.3 Information distribution and the structure of texts 1802.5.4 Information structure and layering 1802.5.5 Voice 180

Chapter 3

Complex sentences 183

3.1 Introduction 1833.2 Complex sentences in Functional Grammar 183

3.2.1 Introduction: The semantic basis of complex sentence formation 1833.2.2 Coordination in FG 1843.2.3 Embedding in FG: (i) Verbal restrictors 1873.2.4 Embedding in FG: (ii) Complex terms 1993.2.5 The semantics and syntax of complementation in the Functional

Lexematic Model 2133.3 Complex sentences in Role and Reference Grammar 214

3.3.1 Nexus, juncture and their relationships: A brief overview 2143.3.2 Types of juncture 2153.3.3 Nexus relations 2183.3.4 Clause-linkage markers 2293.3.5 The Interclausal Relations Hierarchy 2313.3.6 Focus structure in complex sentences 2353.3.7 Clausal postmodification in noun phrases 236


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Table of contents

3.3.8 Linking algorithms in complex sentences 2413.3.9 Descriptions of complex sentences in particular languages 259

3.4 Complex sentences in Systemic Functional Grammar 2593.4.1 The Sydney grammar account 2593.4.2 Complex sentences in the Cardiff grammar 291

3.5 Comparison of approaches 2933.5.1 Units and layering in complex sentences 2933.5.2 The nature of the relationships between the units 2963.5.3 The relationship between syntax and semantics in complex

sentences 2993.5.4 Some final examples 300

Chapter 4Discourse, text and context 303

4.1 Introduction 3034.2 Discourse, text and context in Functional Grammar 306

4.2.1 Introduction 3064.2.2 A classification of approaches 3084.2.3 Modelling discourse by analogy with grammar 3084.2.4 Modular approaches 3184.2.5 Reconciling the upward layering and modular approaches 321

4.2.6 Models oriented towards processing 3254.3 Discourse, text and context in Role and Reference Grammar 3314.4 Discourse, text and context in Systemic Functional Grammar 335

4.4.1 Introduction 3354.4.2 Texts and cohesion: An initial orientation 3354.4.3 Discourse and text in relation to metafunction 3374.4.4 Discourse, text and context 3734.4.5 Discourse, text and context in the Cardiff grammar 390

4.5 Comparison of approaches 396

Chapter 5

Learning and applying the grammar 399

5.1 Introduction 3995.2 Language learning 399

5.2.1 Functional Grammar and language learning 3995.2.2 Role and Reference Grammar and language learning 4025.2.3 Systemic Functional Grammar and language learning 413

5.2.4 Comparison of approaches 4275.3 Applications 430


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Table of contents

5.3.1 Computational linguistics 4305.3.2 Stylistics 4435.3.3 Translation and contrastive studies 4485.3.4 Language pathology 4485.3.5 A (semi-) final word on applicability 448

Chapter 6

Functional Grammar, Role and Reference Grammar and Systemic

Functional Grammar: A final assessment and some pointers to the future 451

6.1 Assessment of theories in terms of their own goals 4516.1.1 Functional Grammar 4516.1.2 Role and Reference Grammar 465

6.1.3 Systemic Functional Grammar 4676.2 The limitations of individual theories 4756.3 Criteria for a more comprehensive model 477

6.3.1 Descriptive adequacy: The nature of the data 4776.3.2 Explanatory adequacy 485

6.4 Towards an integrated model 4896.4.1 Language and conceptualisation 4906.4.2 Modelling the grammar 494

6.5 Envoi 499

References 501

Name index 537

Language index 545

Subject index 549


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Preface

In Part 1 of this work I set out to establish criteria for a truly functional approach to lan-guage, and then successively narrowed down the focus, first delineating a set of structural-

functional approaches which give due weight to both structure and function in theory and description, then recognising, within these approaches, a smaller set of structural-functional grammars which attempt to formulate a set of rules by means of which thestructure of any stretch of language can, at least in principle, be generated. I argued thatthree theories were central to this set: Functional Grammar (FG), Role and ReferenceGrammar (RRG) and Systemic Functional Grammar (SFG).

I then went on to present overviews of each of these theories, concentrating on theiraims, assumptions, methodologies and overall structure, within the context of the simplex clause. There followed a chapter in which the theories, as presented up to this point, were

explicitly compared and contrasted.The last three chapters of Part 1 were devotedto particular areas of the grammar of thesimplex clause: the structure and meaning of phrases, the ways in which the theories ac-counted for situation types as represented in language, and their accounts of tense, aspect,modality and polarity.

Part 2 of the work moves from the analysis of individual clauses towards the study of discourse, and then situates the previous material in the context of wider issues by discussing approaches to language acquisition and to the application of linguistic descrip-tions, before rounding off with a review of the three theories discussed in Parts 1 and 2,and suggestions for the development of an integrated model.

Part 2 starts with three chapters which deal with aspects of clauses of particular sig-nificance for their role in discourse. Chapter 1 is concerned with illocution, discussing theways in which FG, RRG and SFG approach the structure and meaning of clauses in theirfunction as speech acts, and how speech acts fit into the overall discourse. Chapter 2 isdevoted to the area of information distribution in the clause or units of similar size, anddiscusses the concepts of topic and focus, given and new information, theme and rheme,etc., and their contribution to the analysis of discourse. Chapter 3 deals with ways in whichclauses can be combined into larger units, and so covers not only coordination and sub-ordination (e.g. Halliday on the ‘clause complex’), but also work within a more strongly

typological perspective which seeks to show that this dichotomy is too simple (e.g. RRGon cosubordination, etc.).


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Structure and Function

Chapter 4 then covers further perspectives on discourse. Here, I summarise the recentproliferation of models of discourse structure in FG, relationships between focus structureand syntax in RRG, and the wealth of work in systemic linguistics on cohesion, on dis-course and text in relation to metafunction, and on the relationship between discourse andthe social contexts in which it is embedded, involving the concepts of register and genre.

Chapter 5 looks at structural-functionalist accounts of language acquisition and at thework done in systemic linguistics on language in education. I then consider applicationsof structural-functional descriptions of languages to computational linguistics, stylistics,translation and contrastive studies, and language pathology.

Chapter 6 presents a final evaluation of the three theories with respect to the stan-dards of adequacy they set for themselves, and then discusses the limitations of individualtheories, pointing out the dangers inherent in simply accepting a partial set of standardsof adequacy. The work ends with a discussion of criteria of discoursal, sociocultural, psy-

chological/cognitive, acquisitional, typological and possibly computational adequacy inrelation to a more comprehensive model, the implications of such criteria for the shape of the model, and how the theories reviewed in the two books might contribute to such anintegrated approach.

As in Part 1, the discussion is illustrated throughout with authentic examples takenfrom corpora of English and Spanish, with occasional material also from Dutch andGooniyandi. The Gooniyandi examples are taken from taped narratives in the materialcollected by McGregor and published as McGregor (1990), which is not, to my knowl-edge, available in computer-readable readable form. Details of the corpora used in Part 2are given in the table below.

Examples in this work taken from the British National Corpus cite their source by means of a three letter code and the sentence number within the text. The source texts are,for the most part, copyright and may not be cited or redisseminated except as a part of the corpus. Full bibliographic details of the source concerned are available from the BNCproject, or on the world wide web.1 For the London-Lund corpus, the reference consistsof the text category number, text number (and subtext identification where present) andtone unit numbers. For the HCM corpus, the number of the text and the page number inthe written version of the corpus (Esgueva & Cantarero 1981) are given. For the Corpusde Referencia and the ECI Dutch corpus, the filename only is cited, since no other suitable

reference categories are given in the texts.

. For example, to find the source for text “ABC”, consult the URL http://sara.natcorp.ox.ac.uk/

BNCbib/AB.html#ABC. For further information about the British National Corpus, consult its website athttp://www.natcorp.ox.ac.uk.


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Preface

Corpora used to provide examples

Corpus Language Approximate

size (words)

Brief description

British NationalCorpus (BNC)

English 100 million 90% written, 10% spoken.Mainly from 1975–1993.Tagged with part of speech foreach word.

London-Lund Corpus(LLC)

English ½ million Spoken, 1960s/1970s. Hasprosodic annotations.

El Habla de la Ciudadde Madrid2 (HCM)

Spanish 150,000 Spoken, in conversations withinterviewer, also spontaneousrecorded conversations. 4generations of speakers.Collected 1970s.

Corpus Oral deReferencia de la LenguaEspañolaContemporánea(Referencia)

Spanish 1 million Spoken, various subgenres.Early 1990s

European CorpusInitiative MultilingualCorpus on CD-ROM(ECI)

Large numberof languagesrepresented.Used in thisbook for Dutch

data.

98 million inall

Wide variety of material,mainly written. Dutchcomponent used was from theLeiden Corpus of Dutch,consisting of newspapers,

transcribed speech, etc.

. This is a computer-readable version of the materials in Esgueva & Cantarero (1981). I am indebted to theeditors for permission to convert these materials into computer-readable form.


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Chapter 1

Illocution and related phenomena

. Introduction

In this chapter, I shall discuss the ways in which aspects of utterances related to theirfunction as speech acts are handled in Functional Grammar, Role and Reference Grammarand Systemic Functional Grammar. This will involve consideration of the extent to whichillocution is treated as part of the grammar; how it is proposed to handle any aspects of illocution which are not regarded as part of the grammar itself; the relationship betweenillocution and categories such as declarative, interrogative, imperative and exclamative;and the relationship between illocution and intonation.

. Illocution in Functional Grammar

In this section, I shall expand considerably on the very brief picture of illocution in FGgiven in §3.2.2.7 of Part 1. I begin with Dik’s view of illocution, and then move on tocritiques of his position and alternative proposals.

.. Dik’s view of illocution

Dik proposes an illocutionary variable, E, at Level 4 in the hierarchy of clause structure, to

account for cases such as that in example (1) below, where that refers anaphorically to thespeech act the previous speaker has just produced.

(1) A. if we do it alternate days you’re going to finish up not really having done any-thing special

B. (laughs) no but [a] (laughs) that ’s not fair (LLC 4 1 640–644)

Dik (1997a:301, 1997b:231) differentiates three types of illocution: that which is intendedby the speaker (IllS), that which is encoded in the clausal expression (IllE), and that whichis interpreted by the addressee (IllA). Where fully successful communication is achieved,IllA is identical to IllS, but in cases where IllE does not encode IllS very explicitly, thereare, as Dik points out, many instances where the interpreted illocution differs from that


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intended by the speaker: for instance, a statement intended simply as an observation mightbe misinterpreted by the addressee as a warning. Dik makes it clear that it is the illocutionas coded in the expression which is of central interest in FG:

. . . from the point of view of grammar we are primarily interested in IllE: the illocu-tion to the extent that it is coded in linguistic expressions. IllE will on the one handhave some kind of reflection in the formal (including the prosodic) structure of thelinguistic expression (if not, it could not be said to be coded in that expression); onthe other hand, it is an integrated part of the semantic structure of the expression. Forthese two reasons, IllE is a property of linguistic expressions that a grammar will haveto account for. (Dik 1997b:232)

Dik (1997a:300–301) comments that many attempts to set up speech act typologies havepaid insufficient attention to grammatical coding, and have approached illocution mainly

from the viewpoint of the speaker, rather than as an aspect of a communicative rela-tionship between speaker and addressee. He also takes issue with the tendency to regardthe final interpretation of the utterance as the basis for the assignment of its primary illocutionary force.

Dik (1997b:232–236) rejects, for a number of reasons, the type of analysis which pos-tulates, for all clauses with illocutionary force, an underlying structure containing a per-formative verb. Explicit performative clauses are very rare in authentic interaction; fur-thermore, when they are used, they are clearly marked versions of the corresponding ‘im-plicit performatives’ (i.e. clauses which use grammatical devices to indicate illocution),often employed as emphatic repetitions: it therefore seems unwise to postulate perfor-

matives as the basic structure. In any case, the performative analysis has run into many problems, which are extensively discussed in the literature. Moreover, FG does not permitthe kind of deletion operation which would be needed in order to get from the underlyingperformative structure to the structure of the actual utterance.

In view of the concentration on IllE, it is natural that Dik should approach the de-scription of illocution by asking what speech act values are universally encoded in thegrammars of languages. He recognises several basic sentence types:1

In all languages we find special sentence types classifiable as Declaratives, Interrog-atives, and Imperatives, and in most languages we find a special sentence type for

Exclamatives. (Dik 1997a:301)

Each of the four basic illocutions, as coded in sentence type, can be interpreted in terms of the ways in which the speaker wishes to change the pragmatic information of the addressee(Dik 1997a:301–302, 1997b:239). The glosses given for each sentence type are as follows:

. This claim is perhaps somewhat exaggerated: for instance, McGregor (1990: 369, 382–383) claims thatGooniyandi has no morphological, syntactic or even prosodic means for indicating that an utterance is tobe taken as a question or directive. Clearly, an extensive typological survey of this area would be of interest:Dik (1997b:238) offers data from just seven languages to make his point. His assumptions are neverthelessreasonable as a working hypothesis.


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Chapter 1 Illocution and related phenomena

Declarative: S wishes A to add the content of the linguistic expression to his pragmaticinformation.

Interrogative: S wishes A to provide him with the verbal information as requested in

the linguistic expression.Imperative: S wishes A to perform the controlled SoA as specified in the linguisticexpression.

Exclamative: S wishes A to know that the content of the linguistic expression impressesS as surprising, unexpected, or otherwise worthy of notice.(Dik 1997b:239, his (12) and (13))

Each of these basic illocutions is incorporated into the grammar as an operator at Level 4.The operators Decl, Int and Excl take the proposition in their scope, while Imp takes the

predication directly, in view of the fact that an Imperative clause is not used to get someoneto entertain some proposition, but rather to get them to effect the SoA referred to by thepredication (see also Hengeveld 1989:154). Note that in the case of the Imperative, thefact that the SoA is to be carried out after the time of utterance is indicated by means of an operator, Post(erior), at the predicational level. Examples from English are given withskeletal analyses below.

(2) . . . his leg broke in two places. (BNC GVL 3671)

(3) Decl E: X: Past e: break [V] (his leg)Proc (two places)Loc

(4) Is the doctor treating the condition rather than the symptoms? (BNC CE1 1617)(5) Int E: X: Pres e: Prog treat [V] (the doctor )Ag (the condition rather than the symp-

toms)Go

(6) Pass me the can. (BNC KCW 1405)

(7) Imp E: Post e: pass [V] ( you)Ag (the can)Go (me)Rec

(8) What a surprise he’s going to get. (BNC FRS 2577)

(9) Excl E: X: Pres Prosp e: get [V] (he)Proc (a surprise)Go

Not only independent clauses, but also embedded ones, can have an illocutionary opera-

tor, to handle the differences between embedded statements, questions and commands.As we saw briefly in §3.2.2.7 of Part 1, illocutionary value can also be specified or

modified lexically, through π4 satellites. Dik et al. (1990: 54), cite Greenbaum’s (1969) ob-servation that illocutionary satellites such as seriously can occur in front of questions andmany (e.g. honestly ) also in front of imperative or optative clauses, whereas propositional(π3) satellites such as hopefully or probably cannot. Dik et al. (1990:38–39) also point outthat the functions of many illocutionary satellites are the same as those of satellites at lowerlevels, the difference being that the illocutionary ones modify the speech act rather thanthe SoA. Thus illocutionary satellites can express the manner of the speech act (see exam-

ples (10) and (11)), a Beneficiary of it (e.g. (12), interpreted as ‘I am saying this to youfor your own sake’ rather than ‘try for your own sake’), or aspects of the communicative


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setting, such as reason (13), condition (14) or position in a temporal sequence of speechacts (15).

(10) Frankly , I don’t know why I am here. (BNC CCK 814)

(11) Briefly , the principle states that physics appears the same to any observer in free fall whatever the magnitude of the gravitational field. (BNC H8K 67)

(12) Just try not to do anything silly – please, for your own sake . (BNC JXU 877)

(13) Anyway, since you ask , the rings were black and there were ten of them, all on her right hand. (BNC AR2 566)

(14) So in case any of you are worried about, you know, inappropriate headings , ignorethem, ... (BNC K6V 500)

(15) For the last time , Harriet Shakespeare is not here! (BNC AC4 2170)

Dik also assumes that the basic illocution of an expression can be converted to other val-ues. In TFG1 (Dik 1997a:302) he proposes three different types of conversion: pragmatic,lexical and grammatical. By pragmatic conversion is meant the construction, by the ad-dressee, of an interpretation which is not coded in the expression, but must be inferredfrom aspects of co-text and/or context. For instance, the expression in (2) above could beused, in conversation, as a warning to the addressee to be careful when operating in cir-cumstances similar to those which caused the person’s leg to break; or it could even be usedas a threat that the speaker will break the addressee’s legs just as (s)he did with the otherperson. As expected from Dik’s concentration on coded illocution, such interpretations

are regarded as beyond the concerns of the grammar:

This type of conversion will not be handled in the linguistic description, but in awider, pragmatic theory of verbal interaction. (Dik 1997a:302)

Lexical conversion is concerned with the use of a performative verb to make the illocutionmore explicit, as in (16), with the analysis in (17):

(16) I tell you I did not go. (BNC H7V 1049)

(17) Decl Ei: X i: Pres ei: tell [V] (I )Ag( you)Rec (Decl E j: X j: Past Neg e j: go [V] (I )Ag)Go

In TFG2, Dik no longer makes use of the concept of lexical conversion: his interpretation(Dik 1997b:252–254) of examples of the type shown in (16) is that since the content of theembedded clause, with its illocutionary operator, is enough in itself to add the requiredpragmatic information to the addressee’s store, the additional pragmatic information thatthe speaker is telling the addressee the assertion acts as a reinforcement of that assertion.

Grammatical conversion refers to the situation in which a language has convention-alised devices for converting a basic illocution into a derived one. Such conversions arethus within the scope of the grammar itself. Dik (1997b:249–250) concedes, however, thatit is sometimes difficult to draw a borderline between grammatical and pragmatic conver-

sion. For English, Dik (1997b: 243) gives examples of the grammatical conversion of Declto Int and Imp to Req(uest) by means of a tag; Decl to Req and Int to Req by means of


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please; Int to Rhet(orical question), Int to Excl and Imp to Excl by means of intonation.Some examples are given in (18)–(23) below.

(18) You aren’t bored, are you, Liz? (BNC FSG 10) [Decl > Int]

(19) Can you just put that orangejuice somewhere for me please. (BNC KCT 1002)[Int > Req]

(20) Please ring soon. (BNC A6J 1719) [Imp > Req]

(21) Stop worrying will you? (BNC ACB 1348) [Imp > Req]

(22) Who would want immortality? (BNC BN3 2069) [Int > Rhet]

(23) You want our money? (BNC CSA 263) [Decl > Int]

In addition to the above types of grammatical illocutionary converter, Dik mentions

modal particles, such as unstressed nou in Dutch or mal in German, which can unam-biguously convert Interrogatives into Rhetorical Questions. He also treats mechanismsfor the mitigation or reinforcement of illocutions in terms of grammatical illocutionary conversion: for instance, the reinforcing que of Spanish (see Haverkate 1979; Hengeveld1989), which is non-specific for sentence type (see (24), (25), (26A)), is treated by Dik as a modifier of the basic illocutionary operator. He comments (Dik 1997a:304) that “π4operators may have a rich internal structure”, but gives no further detail on what this richstructure might consist of.

(24) ¡Que

that

no

neg

me

me

extraña! (Referencia

surprise-pres.3sg

CCON034A.ASC)

‘It doesn’t surprise me!’

(25) . . . quethat

noneg

meme

pregunte! (Referenciaask-imp.2sg.polite2

CCON018B.ASC)

‘. . . don’t ask me!’

(26) A. Quethat

siif

loit

quiereswant-pres.2sg

conwith

mantequilla.butter

‘Do you want it with butter?’B. Me

to-me

parece

seem-pres.3sg

que

that

sí. (Referencia

yes

BCON043B.ASC)

‘I think so.’

Dik (1997b:257–289) presents a more detailed analysis of interrogative illocutionary force,on which the following summary is closely based. He notes that although questions aremarked in some way for their interrogative nature, the answers which questions requestare not marked by specific grammatical devices. Dik suggests that this is because questions

. Formally, the negative imperative in Spanish is expressed by means of the subjunctive (in this case pregunte), so that it wouldalso be possible to analyse this example as being declarative, the subjunctive following

from the use of que in this type of construction. Nevertheless, since the clause would be clearly imperativewithout the que, it seems legitimate to interpret que as a reinforcer here.


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are initiating in discourse, whereas answers are reactive, acting as the second member of an adjacency pair, so that they fit into a communicative slot whose characteristics are al-ready established. Dik (p. 260) distinguishes yes/no, disjunctive and Q-word types of ques-tion, the first two corresponding to a closed predication with non-specified or specifiedalternatives, respectively, and an answer set limited to ‘Yes’ and ‘No’ and modalised ver-sions of these, the third corresponding to an open predication and a potentially unlimitedanswer set.

The bulk of Dik’s discussion (pp. 263–289) is devoted to Q-word questions, on thegrounds that these show the most interesting typological properties. Such questions im-ply a presupposition on the part of the speaker that there is some correct answer whichwill supply the information requested. If the addressee fails to provide this information,any other response is seen as a non-answer. An important property of Q-constituents (i.e.constituents containing a Q-word) is that they are assigned the pragmatic function Focus.

The devices for marking Focus in Q-constituents turn out to be similar, or identical, tothose for indicating Focus in non-question environments: emphatic accent, Focus mark-ers, placement in a special position for pragmatically salient constituents, or placementwithin a cleft construction.3

In the representation of Q-word questions, Dik (pp. 265–266) uses the Int operator toindicate that the expression as a whole counts as interrogative, and the operator Q to show that part of the expression which is being questioned. The basic structure of the Englishexample in (27) is thus as in (28).

(27) When did you plan all this? (BNC G04 275)

(28) Int E: X: Past e: plan [V] ( you)Ag (all this)Go (Q x i)Temp

Q-constituents in the clause can contain three kinds of information, relating to the factthat a questioned constituent is involved, the type of entity being questioned, and thefunctional status of theconstituent in the predication (p. 268). These pieces of informationmay be expressed synthetically, as in (27), or analytically as in (29).

(29) . . . at what time did all this take place? (BNC EF7 249)

Dik (p. 269) proposes a fuller representation for Q-constituents than the simplified onegiven in (28), in which the type of entity questioned is specified. In the case of an analyticexpression, the predicate representing the entity type is itself included in the representa-tion; if the expression is synthetic, the entity type appears as a kind of selection restric-tion. Using this fuller form of representation, the structures of (27) and (29) are as in(30) and (31).

(30) Int E: X: Past e: plan [V] ( you)Ag (all this)Go (Qx i: )Temp

(31) Int E: X: Past e: take place [V] (all this)Proc (Qx i: time)Temp

. Focus and other pragmatic functions will be discussed in Chapter 2.


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In cases such as the above, the fuller representations appear to be somewhat redundant. Inthe case of nominal Q-constituents, however, they will allow the expression rules to gen-erate the correct forms: who(m) if the Q-constituent is (Qx i: person) or (Qx i: ),what if it is (Qx i: thing ) or (Qx i: ).

Dik (pp. 270–276) discusses the types of constituents which can be questioned, andthe conditions under which accessibility to particular constituent types obtains. In princi-ple, any term can be questioned by means of a Q-constituent. Most languages also permitthe questioning of constituents within terms. For instance, Dik (p. 271) assumes that ina clause such as (32) in English, the Q operator applies to an underlying demonstrativeconstituent, as shown in (33), while in example (34), it is the possessive that is questioned,as shown in (35).

(32) Which newspaper do you take regularly ...? (BNC BM5 375)

(33) Int E: X: Pres e: take [V] ( you)Ag (Qdem 1 x i: newspaper [N])Go(34) Whose nose did you rub in the dirt . . . ? (BNC CE5 460)

(35) Int E: X: Past e: rub [V] ( you)Ag (d1x i: nose [N]: {(Qx j)Poss}) (dx k : dirt )Loc

Cross-linguistically, predicates are much harder to question, and Dik takes this to be be-cause the predicate is the specified element in the predicate frame, while a wider range of terms could fill the argument slots in that frame.

As far as the placement of Q-constituents is concerned, Dik (276ff.) contrasts twopossibilities: pattern position (that is the position which would be occupied by the cor-responding non-questioned constituent) and the special position(s) available for con-stituents with Focus function in the language at issue. In many languages, including En-glish, this special position is the initial position in the clause. Even in languages with otherpositions for Focus (e.g. Aghem, Turkish, Hungarian, Basque) this position is used for Q-constituentsunless these remain in pattern position. In some languages, including English,both Focus position and pattern position are possible, as illustrated in (36) and (37).

(36) What did you see? (BNC BMN 1352)

(37) You saw what? (BNC B0B 1412)

The position of the Q-word in (37) is the same as that in the corresponding declarative.In English and some other languages, the version with the Q-constituent in pattern

position is pragmatically marked: in the case of English, it can be used only for echoquestions. In some other languages, the two positions for the Q-constituent are in freevariation.

Dik (pp. 282–283) enumerates the advantages and disadvantages of the two strategies.The Q-Pattern strategy has the advantages of minimising differences in structure betweendeclarative and interrogative and making the relational structure of interrogatives trans-parent; the disadvantages are that the Q-constituent does not attract great prominence,and that if it comes late in the clause, it may be some time before it becomes clear that the

clause is interrogative. The advantages and disadvantages of the Q-Focus strategy are more


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or less mirror images of these. In terms of typological distribution, languages using Q-Focus are in the majority (ca. 70%), only 30% using pattern position for Q-constituents.Within Q-Focus languages, Q-initial types are strongly correlated with VSO/SVO orders,while the majority of SOV languages are of the Q-Pattern type. The overall generalisationis that Q-constituents overwhelmingly come before the verb – or, in terms of the nomen-clature used in FG (see §3.2.3 of Part 1), Q-constituents normally occur in the Prefield.Dik suggests that this may be because the predicate, as the central element in the pred-ication, is the linear limit for determination of the main features of the expression, andbecause pragmatically specialised positions are found the Prefield region, even in Postfieldlanguages.

Dik (p. 284) remarks that it is strange that languages do not, in general, adopt astrategy which would combine the advantages of the two types: an interrogative parti-cle in initial position, with the questioned constituent in pattern position, but marked

in some way.Some languages (including English) allow questions with more than one Q-word, as

in (38).

(38) Why did what go wrong? (BNC KD0 3703)

Dik (p. 287) hypothesises that the respective placements of the Q-constituents depend onthe ease or difficulty of placing the same kind of constituent in particular positions ina non-interrogative clause. For instance, it is easier to put Objects in initial position inDutch than in English, and correspondingly, a Q-word question with the Object in first

position is more marked in English than in Dutch. Some languages allow more than oneQ-word in the ‘first’ slot in the clause, and these again tend to be those in which more thanone item can be fronted in a non-interrogative clause.

.. Alternative views of illocution in FG

A number of alternatives to Dik’s account of illocution have been proposed. The mainissues, which are interrelated, are whether the underlying representation should containan illocutionary variable or an illocutionary frame, what the status of the E variable is, therelationship between illocution and layering, and the treatment of ‘indirect’ illocutions,

which in turn raises questions regarding the relationship between grammar and pragmat-ics in the area of illocution. I shall deal with each of these in turn, and then look briefly atwork on exclamations and at some speech acts which are not treated as illocutions in FG.Finally, I discuss proposals for a more cognitively-oriented view of illocution.

... Operator or frame? As we saw briefly in §3.3 of Part 1, Hengeveld’s model of illocution differs from Dik’sin that it handles illocutionary force in terms of an illocutionary frame rather than anoperator. This frame is of the general form shown in (39), where ILL represents an ab-

stract illocutionary predicate, together with arguments S (speaker), A (addressee) and X 1(proposition).


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(39) ILL (S) (A) (X 1)

Hengeveld (1990:6) claims that this proposal not only emphasises the relational nature of speech acts, but that the postulation of an abstract illocutionary predicate also explains

why, for example, the illocution can be modified by adverbs such as frankly .Dik (1997b:236) rejects this proposal on the grounds that it is a version of the perfor-

mative hypothesis, against which he has argued, though Hengeveld’s proposal does avoidany undesirable deletion phenomena. Furthermore, Dik points out that since variables forthe speaker and addressee are present for all utterances, by default, they do not need to bestated as part of the structure for each utterance. Some scholars (e.g. Rijkhoff) have takenup and expanded Hengeveld’s proposal, while others have rejected it. The reasons are todo with matters which will be taken up in later subsections.

It should also be noted that Hengeveld regards illocutionary mitigation and reinforce-ment markers as the expression of operators at the illocutionary layer. Thus examples(24)–(26), given above, would have an underlying structure with a π4 operator with thevalue ‘reinforcement’, rather than being the result of grammatical illocutionary conversionas in Dik’s account.

... The status of the E variableBolkestein (1992a:390) has pointed out that the status of the E variable in the accounts of Hengeveld and Dik is equivocal: it is said to represent a speech act expressed by a clause(e.g. Dik 1989a:248), but is also referred to as if it stands for the clause itself. Bolkesteinobserves that regarding E as standing for a speech act is confusing with regard to the claim

that the complements of linguistic action verbs are of the E type for direct speech, butof the X (propositional) type for indirect reported speech. What the complement actu-ally represents is the utterance, or product of the speech act, and this is what Bolkesteinsuggests E represents. She provides further evidence from the fact that independent ut-terances can be expanded using satellites such as briefly which give information about theproperties of the message, but not by satellites such as suddenly which qualify the speechevent itself. Furthermore, complements of speech verbs can be specified as true or false(what he said was true), but it is odd to specify them as corresponding to reality or not(?what he said was real ), again suggesting that they represent messages rather than events.

A similar point regarding direct speech complements is made by Vet (1998a:8). Speechacts are not themselves said: what is said is an utterance, the product of a speech act.

... Illocution and layering Bolkestein (1992a) has discussed a number of problems with regard to the relationshipbetween illocution and the layering hypothesis in FG. Firstly, she observes that in Dik’saccount the illocutionary operator has scope over illocutionary satellites, whereas in facta satellite such as frankly , used as an illocutionary modifier, takes the whole of the rest of the clause in its scope.

Secondly, Bolkestein (1992a:392–398) shows that there are problems with the claim

that illocution should be represented only at the topmost layer of the hierarchy. She


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demonstrates that in classical Latin verbs taking indirect speech complements can be clas-sified according to the illocution(s) they allow in their complement clauses. Furthermore,in indirectly reported rhetorical questions in Latin, the conversion of question to rhetor-ical question leaves an imprint on the complement clause in the form of its mood. Theupshot of these facts is that illocution will have to be represented in the structure of thecomplement clauses themselves, as well as in the main clause. This is obviously a problemfor the view, current at the time of Bolkestein’s article, that indirect speech complementsare at the propositional level. We saw in §3.3 of Part 1, however, that Dik (1997b:102)later proposed a different analysis, in which both direct and indirect speech complementsare full clauses, the difference between them being captured by placing direct speech com-plements directly into the complement slot, while indirect speech is embedded within aclausal term which acts as complement to the verb of saying. Dik (1997b:250–251) sum-marises Bolkestein’s claims, and agrees that even converted illocutions must be available

in indirect speech complements: his new proposal, of course, makes this possible.Rijkhoff (1995) proposes to add to the model proposed by Hengeveld for the illo-

cutionary area, by making a distinction between the speech event (concerned with thepurpose of the utterance in the discourse, and with the participants relevant to the in-teraction) and the speech act (concerned with the illocutionary frame and the mappingof individual participants on to specific roles of Speaker, Addressee and Bystander), andallocating the act and the event to different layers in the structure. The motivation for thisproposal will be discussed in the next subsection.

...

The treatment of ‘indirect’ illocutionsMuch of the work modifying the proposals of Hengeveld and Dik on illocution has beenin the area of how FG should handle cases where the illocution intended by the speakerand/or interpreted by the addressee does not correspond straightforwardly to that en-coded in the value of one of the illocutionary operators (Dik), or the illocutionary predi-cate (Hengeveld), i.e. DECL, INT, IMP or EXCL. This work raises a number of importantquestions concerned with the notion of illocutionary conversion and the respective rolesof grammar and pragmatics in illocution, as well as more general issues such as the statusof operators and satellites in FG.

.... Vet on illocutionary modifiers. We start with a series of papers by Vet (1990, 1997,1998a, 1998b) concerned with both illocution and modality, in which he proposes a num-ber of modifications to previous treatments of illocution. Vet (1990) discusses some caseswhere the combination of present tense and a first person Subject creates meanings whichare not available in other tenses and/or persons. One such case is exemplified in (40)–(43).

(40) I hear you’re planning to retire so you can concentrate on writing . . . (BNC A0F 42)

(41) I heard you’re planning to retire so you can concentrate on writing .

(42) He hears you’re planning to retire so you can concentrate on writing.

(43) He heard you’re planning to retire so you can concentrate on writing.


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In (40), the speaker indicates that s/he acquired the knowledge through hearing aboutit, and it is very similar in meaning to (41), while (42) cannot be used in a similar way and is quite different in meaning from (43). Furthermore, (40) and (41) have differentbehaviour with respect to negation: I heard in (41) can be negated, while I hear in (40)cannot. Vet (1990: 129) takes these facts to indicate that I hear in (40) is outside the scopeof both tense and negation. He analyses phenomena such as these in terms of a model of the underlying structure of the clause in which the propositional variable X is bound by acomplex illocutionary operator δILL, in which each of the two parts, δ and ILL, can take arange of values. ILL takes values such as DECL and INT, and if δ is not further specified,δDECL produces a straight declarative and δINT a straight interrogative, for example. I hear in (40) is taken as a hearsay marker specifying the δ position in δDECL .

Vet also uses the δ component of his proposed operator to account for French peut-être (‘perhaps’) and for certain uses of the future tense in French, where this tense does not

indicate future time, but rather the suspension of a judgement about the truth value of theproposition, or mitigation of the speech act in the direction of politeness. In view of theseanalyses, it would seem that Vet’s δILL takes over not only the illocutionary (mitigatingand reinforcing) operators of Hengeveld’s scheme, but also what would be considered by Hengeveld and by Dik as operators (in the case of the future indicating a suspension of

judgement on truth value), and even satellites (e.g. peut-être), at the propositional layer.In Vet (1997), the non-temporal uses of the future tense in French are analysed in

somewhat similar terms, but now within a more finely differentiated model of the under-lying clause structure, in which propositional and clause layers, as well as the extendedpredication layer, have separate variables, each provided with a specifier, or modifier, asset out in Vet (1992). The propositional variable X takes a δ3 modal modifier representingdegree of commitment to truth value, while the speech act variable E takes a δ4 modi-fier representing variations in the force with which the illocution is presented. The use of the future tense to indicate suspension of commitment to the truth value of the propo-sition can therefore now be located at the propositional level as a δ3 modifier, while themitigation use of the future tense is a δ4 modifier of the illocutionary force DECL.

As noted briefly in Chapter 9 of Part 1, Vet (1997:22–27) also argues that the expres-sions je crois (‘I believe/think’), je sais (‘I know’) and the epistemic use of the verb devoir (‘must’) show asymmetries between first person present tense use and use in other tenses

and persons, as previously discussed for I hear , as well as differences in behaviour in in-terrogative and conditional clauses. Je crois and devoir represent δ3 modifiers, while je saisis analysed as a δ4 illocutionary modifier, since unlike the others, it cannot be constructedwith oui/non ( Je crois/*sais que oui/non) so is not an assessment of truth value.

Vet (1998b) extends the analysis to the expressions peut-être and peut-être que (‘per-haps’), il se peut que and il est possible que (‘it is possible that’). Vet shows that only thelast of these can occur within the scope of a negative and an interrogative operator. Vettakes this to indicate that possible is the predicate of the main clause, but that the other ex-pressions lie outside the predication. Peut-être is treated as a modal satellite at the propo-

sitional layer (cf. the very different 1990 analysis outlined earlier). Vet points out that il se peut que and il est possible que take the subjunctive, while peut-être que takes the indica-


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tive. He interprets this as reflecting a difference between being part of, or modifying, thepropositional content, in the case of the first two expressions, and modifying the illocu-tion, in the case of peut-être que, regarded as a mitigator indicating that the utterance isbeing presented tentatively as a contribution to the ongoing discourse.

It should be noted that, as indicated very briefly in Chapter 9 of Part 1, the proposalssummarised above raise the important issue of the status of operators in FG, in that Vet’saccount of illocution and modality proposes operators which arguably have a lexical ratherthan a grammatical realisation. Yet, as Vet (1997: 25) points out, we cannot readily analysethe relevant expressions as satellites, since many of them (e.g. je crois, je sais, I hear ) havepredicate-argument form, rather than being adverbial in nature.

.... Risselada on alternatives to illocutionary conversion. We turn now to the work of Risselada (1990), in which she reviews and criticises Dik’s concept of illocutionary conver-

sion as a way of handling lack of congruence between the illocution as coded in the illo-cutionary operator and the illocutionary value intended by the speaker and/or interpretedby the addressee.

Risselada’s aim is to provide at least a partial answer to the question “to what extentillocutionary force can be considered as actually encoded in linguistic expressions and atwhich point a pragmatic analysis should take over the job” (Risselada 1990:1). She pointsout that in the accounts of illocution given by Dik and Hengeveld, elements located withinthe proposition cannot contribute to illocutionary force. She sees this as problematic inthe case of elements which are integrated into the predication, but nevertheless affect the

illocution, examples being explicitly performative matrix predicates or let’s in English ‘firstperson imperatives’.Risselada (1990:4) notes that in both Dik’s and Hengeveld’s proposals, illocution is

primarily connected with sentence type. She points out that it is not totally clear whetherDik intends a general or a more specific value for his four primary illocutions: his discus-sion of examples suggests that the imperative sentence type is associated specifically withorders, while his definitions of the four basic illocutions are more general. Risselada advo-cates associating only a very general illocutionary value with sentence type, in view of, forexample, the wide range of illocutions which can be expressed by imperative sentences.4

She also suggests that we should not automatically regard the sentence type as the most

important factor in determining the illocutionary force, since other lexical, semantic andintonational properties may in some cases carry heavier weight.

Risselada (1990:7–8) observes that the distinction made by Hengeveld and Dik be-tween illocutionary conversion and illocutionary modification (by mitigation or rein-forcement), although potentially useful, is by no means clear-cut, since elements such asthe Dutch particle even (literally ‘for a moment’), English please, or a question tag (e.g. isn’t it ) can be seen as modifying the force of the illocution, as well as converting one illocutioninto another. She also points out (1990:9) that the concept of illocutionary conversion

. And, we might add, the even wider range of illocutions expressed by declaratives.


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is not consistent with the declared aim of FG to account for the ways in which speakersexpress what they want to say, since it is unlikely that a speaker wanting to convey a par-ticular illocutionary intention will first select a different, basic illocution which then hasto be modified. We can, however, dispense with the concept of illocutionary conversionif, as Risselada suggests, we treat sentence type as only one of the ways in which illocutioncan be expressed grammatically. Risselada (1990: 9–19) illustrates this thesis with an anal-

ysis of explicit performatives and metadirectives, can you requests, and proposals with let’sin English.

(44) I promise you I’ll never see him again. (BNC GV7 1173)

(45) Tell me what you did. (BNC CM7 1301)

(46) Can you lend me a fiver? (BNC KB1 3985)

(47) Let’s go and see. (BNC FPF 2202)

In the case of an explicit performative such as (44), the illocutionary interpretation isthe result of an interaction between the declarative sentence type, first person agent andpresent tense. In a metadirective such as (45), the illocutionary interpretation requiredfrom the addressee (in this case that of a question) is a function of the imperative sentencetype, the lexical meaning of tell and a second person agent.

In the case of can you requests such as (46), regarded by Dik as interpreted throughpragmatic illocutionary conversion unless they contain an unambiguous marker of re-questive status such as please, Risselada’s view is that they unambiguously express a re-quest and so are direct expressions of illocutionary intention. Since requests inherently offer the addressee the option of refusal to comply, and since the imperative sentence typecannot signal this, an interrogative sentence type is used (an alternative is to tag an imper-ative with will you). The optionality meaning of the interrogative combines with that of the predicate and the second person agent to give the intended force. Risselada points outthat can you requests are differentiated from straight questions using can you, in that theformer must refer to specific actions or behaviour. Furthermore, the request type, unlikethe question type, is not asking about the ability of the addressee to perform the action,but rather about whether it is possible for the addressee to comply, as indicated by the factthat in English possibly , and in Dutch misschien (‘perhaps’) can be added as a mitigation

marker. This explains why can you,butnot are you able to, is an appropriate conventionali-sation for requests. Risselada also notes that if we change the modal from can to could , thismitigates the request illocution, not the interrogative illocution which would be regardedas basic in the Hengeveld and Dik proposals. She finds further confirmation of her posi-tion in data from Classical Latin, where similar requests are expressed not by posse (‘can,be able to’), but by potin (est) (‘it is possible’), which, like directive verbal predicates, isfollowed by a clause with ut and the subjunctive, rather than by the infinitive as with posse.

Proposals such as (47) are like suggestions in that they attempt to get the addressee todo something, but they have the added meaning of including the speaker in the commit-

ment. Risselada (1990:17) observes that in many languages they are expressed using firstperson plural forms. In English and Dutch, we have a grammaticalised lexical expression


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(let’s, laten we), which can also be used ‘adhortatively’ in other persons. This particular useof these verbs is marked grammatically by Subject-verb inversion,5 and also in English by the contraction of let us to let’s. An alternative expression for proposals in English is how about plus gerund.

Risselada (1990:19) concludes that an approach in which sentence type is seen as pro-viding only a very general illocutionary meaning, which may be combined with meaningsfrom other grammatical and lexical devices, allows us to minimise the extent to which weneed to postulate illocutionary indeterminacy and indirectness. Although the final arbiterof illocutionary assessment is the pragmatic theory of verbal interaction, this componentwill have less work to do, and will have a greater chance of success, if the informationprovided by the grammar itself is as detailed as possible. Risselada notes that her pro-posals raise a number of problems for the representation of illocutionary phenomena inthe grammar, in view of the greater indeterminacy of the distinction between illocution

and proposition in her model, the variation in the role of the sentence type depending onthe presence of other illocutionary indicators, and the need for certain conventionalisedexpressions such as can you, let’s and how about to be listed in the lexicon.

In Risselada (1993) the ideas summarised above are developed in the context of astudy of directives in Latin. This work makes considerable use of the concept of prototype,and so can be regarded as leading in the direction of the strongly cognitive approachesof Ruiz de Mendoza and Pérez Hernández which will be discussed in §1.2.2.7. Risselada(1993:33–36) proposes a typology of illocutions according to three types of criteria, eachof which is scalar rather than all-or-none: the aims, intentions and other psychologicalaspects of the speaker; factors related to the addressee, such as his or her reaction; andcharacteristics of the speech act per se, including whether it is concerned with facts, emo-tions or actions. In line with her earlier work, Risselada rejects the strong version of theliteral force hypothesis according to which an utterance has a basic illocutionary force cor-responding to its sentence type, but may also have a further force derived from the basicone through inferential procedures. Instead, she adopts a weaker version of this hypoth-esis, in which a rather general illocutionary value is proposed for each of the three basicsentence types: declaratives simply present a proposition; interrogatives present a propo-sition as (partially) open; imperatives present the content of a proposition for realisation(Risselada 1993:71). Each of the three sentence types is thus compatible with a range of

illocutionary forces, and the actual illocutionary value of an utterance will be a result of the combination of the contribution from sentence type with those from other indicatorssuch as specific lexical items, intonation, and so on. This view is able to dispense with thedichotomy of direct and indirect illocutions, replacing it with the idea that a varying num-ber of linguistic devices may be used to guide the interpretation of illocutionary meaning,and that the larger the number of devices used, the greater the degree of explicitness, orcodification, of the speech act concerned.

. As Risselada observes, the Dutch pronoun we is the normal Subject form, and Quirk et al. (1985:829)

argue that us in the English construction is a Subject, though in the objective case.


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The work of Togeby (1994) reaches very similar conclusions to those of Risselada, inthat he advocates the taking into account of all the various indicators of illocutionary force,including performative verbs, tense, person of Subject, modals, as well as sentence type.

.... Moutaouakil on implicated illocutionary force. A number of modifications toDik’s model are suggested in the work of Moutaouakil. Since his earliest work, which pre-dates the publication of TFG1 (e.g. Moutaouakil 1986), Moutaouakil has emphasised theimportance of accounting not only for the literal illocutionary force of an utterance, butalso for any secondary illocutionary forces which are implicated contextually, includingthose which are not coded in any way in the clause itself.

Implicated illocutions can become progressively more salient in relation to the literalillocution, by means of the process of grammaticalisation. Moutaouakil (1991:4) proposesthat this occurs in two major stages, which he relates to the principle of markedness shift

discussed by Dik (1989a:239ff.). First the implicated illocution becomes conventionalised,acquiring at least as important a status as the literal illocution, and having a generalisedmeaning in all contexts. At a later stage the original implicated illocution may totally dis-place the original literal force, itself becoming literalised. As an example of a convention-alised illocution, Moutaouakil gives the use of can you to signal a request in English; as anexample of a literalised illocution, he cites negative interrogatives with the force of a posi-tive assertion, giving an example from Arabic and glossing it in English as Haven’t I warned

you? .6 Moutaouakil (1991:6–8) presents a number of reasons for his claim that implicatedillocutionary force, as well as literal force, should be accounted for within a linguistic the-

ory such as FG, which has pretensions to pragmatic and psychological adequacy. Clearly,as an important aspect of the pragmatics of the utterance, the total illocutionary potentialshould be described somewhere in the theory. Furthermore, Moutaouakil gives exampleswhich demonstrate that literal and implicated illocutionary forces can co-determine theform of linguistic expressions: the negative particle min in Standard Modern Arabic occursonly in interrogatives which have the implied force of a denial; certain adverbial expres-sions, such as an Arabic phrase glossed as ‘please’, modify the implicated, not the literalforce; although some of the illocutionary force indicating particles of Standard ModernArabic are determined by the literal force, there is one particle which can occur only ininterrogatives conveying a reproach; again in Arabic, a negative interrogative, interpreted

implicationally as a positive assertion, can be coordinated with a clause which has theliteral force of an assertion; and finally, Moutaouakil claims that the intonational con-tour of an utterance with a literal and an implied force is co-determined by these twotypes of force.

. Bothexamples seem somewhat dubious. It is certainly not true that canyou? interrogatives are interpretedas requests in all contexts: it is perfectly possible to imagine a context in which Can you open the window? ispurely a question (e.g. a doctor asking about a patient’s arm injury). Similarly, in English at least, it is notthe case that negative interrogatives are interpreted as positive assertions in all contexts: Oh, haven’t I warned

you? I certainly should have done can be taken as a straight question. It could be, however, that Moutaouakil’sclaim relates specifically to the Arabic construction.


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Moutaouakil (1991:11–18) discusses the relative merits of three possible approachesto the problem of representing both literal and implied illocutionary forces in FG. Firstly,one could attempt to account for all illocutionary phenomena outside the grammar itself,in a wider pragmatic theory of verbal interaction. In Moutaouakil’s view, an appropriatelocation would be the Functional Logic component of Dik’s Model of the Natural Lan-guage User, mentioned briefly in §3.6 of Part 1, in which inferential phenomena are tobe modelled. One of the sub-components of Functional Logic is illocutionary logic, deal-ing with the logical properties of illocutionary operators (Dik 1989b:23). Moutaouakiloutlines the kinds of reasoning which could account for, for example, the calculation of an implicated illocutionary force of reproach from an utterance with interrogative literalforce in Arabic, the implicature process proposed being basically that familiar from thework of Grice and others. However, as Moutaouakil points out, such a scheme would im-ply that all implied illocutions are to be accounted for in terms of inferential calculation,

and therefore cannot account for those cases where the implied illocution has becomeconventionalised.

On the other hand, adopting the position that all illocutionary phenomena are to beaccounted for within the grammar itself runs into the problem of handling highly indirectillocutions in which not only the illocutionary force but also the propositional content ischanged. It is difficult to see, for example, how the grammar could handle the interpreta-tion of a declarative clause stating that it is cold in a particular room, as a request to closethe window.

The most attractive position, then, would appear to be that the responsibility for ac-counting for illocutionary force is shared between the grammatical and the FunctionalLogic components of the overall model of the Natural Language User. The grammar woulddeal with all literal illocutionary forces and with those implicated forces which have a re-flex in form, while the Functional Logic component would handle those cases where animplied force can be calculated, but where the expression itself contains no indication of this interpretation. As Moutaouakil (1991:17–18) notes, this mixed option is in accor-dance with the modular nature of Dik’s model of the Natural Language User; it providesthis model with a way of calculating implied force on the basis of inferential rules, but pos-tulates the involvement of the logical component only when such inference is necessary, socontributing to the psychological plausibility of the model; and finally, the dual solution

avoids the over-burdening of the grammar which resulted in the past from attempts todeal with these phenomena within, for example, generative semantics.

Attractive as it undoubtedly is, the dual mechanism itself faces certain problems, fore-most amongst which is the need for expression rules to have access to information withinthe logical module in order to generate the correct output. Moutaouakil (1991:18) seesthis as “a rather ad hoc and probably costly procedure”.

Moutaouakil’s proposals, then, move tentatively in the direction of a division of labour, in the illocutionary area, between a grammatical and a pragmatic component.This concept has been strongly advocated, though in a somewhat different form, in recent

work in FG, to which I now turn.


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.... Illocution and discourse pragmatics: Recent modular approaches to illocution. Vet(1998a), as we saw earlier, agrees with Bolkestein’s (1992a) view that the E variable shouldrefer to the utterance, the product of a speech act, not the act itself. The utterance is “a mes-sage or part of a message that is transmitted in a communicative situation” (Vet 1998a:12).The underlying structure of the utterance is concerned only with the linguistic propertiesof the message: Vet (1998a:13) regards attempts to build speech act theory into the un-derlying structure as methodologically unsound, and proposes to deal with the speech actitself in a separate, pragmatic module. He relates his proposals to the distinction madeby Dik between illocution as coded in the expression (ILLE), and the illocutionary inten-tion of the speaker (ILLS) and interpretation of the addressee (ILLA). For Vet, as indeedfor Dik, only the first belongs in the grammatical module, the others being handled inthe pragmatic module. As Vet observes, the question is how the two modules should berelated. Vet’s model contains an interface consisting of “the speaker’s unconscious or con-

scious ‘decisions’ as to the linguistic form” (Vet 1998a:16): so far, however, the details of this interface component have been left unspecified.7

It is the relationship between the pragmatic and grammatical modules in Vet’s modelthat deals with what Dik calls illocutionary conversion. For example, consider (48):

(48) A. it’s gone very cold hasn’t it B. [mm] it’s freezing (LLC 1 3 42–45)

It would be quite possible for A to intend his or her utterance as an indirect request forB to put on a fire in the room. In such a case, the pragmatic module would specify that

the speech act for A’s contribution is one of the Speaker requesting the Addressee to puton the fire. The interface rules would then determine that the form of the utterance wouldbe a declarative with the utterance content ‘it’s gone very cold’, plus a question tag, plusthe appropriate intonation patterns. The sentence type of the utterance is chosen to becompatible with the speaker’s communicative intentions (see also Risselada 1993: 71–73).The relationship between the requestive speech act and the declarative form is thus one of mapping, rather than one of conversion: Vet (1998a:15) points out that it is implausiblethat in the production of language in real time, speakers start off with a declarative illo-cution and only then convert it to a request. Although Vet does not discuss forms whichhave become more conventionalised for the performance of particular speech acts, such

as can you? as a standard request form in English, his argument would apply even morestrongly to such cases. As we saw earlier, a similar argument has been put forward by Risselada (1990).

Liedtke (1998) reviews the work of Hengeveld, Risselada, Moutaouakil and Togeby,and concludes that the distinction between linguistic indicators and the illocution itself is crucial, since sentence type does not determine strongly the illocutionary reading, butonly constrains the addressee’s interpretation. His model proposes a grammatical moduleto deal with the various possible grammatical and lexical indicators and a pragmatic mod-

. Vet also claims that his two-module model can give an insightful account of discourse relations. Thisaspect of linguistic patterning will be discussed in Chapter 4.


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ule dealing with the sentence as the realisation of a specific speech act. Liedtke (1998:118)proposes a set of six illocutionary types, based on Searle’s (1975) classification, but split-ting Searle’s Directives into Petitives (orders, requests, commands) and Quaesitives (ques-tions). He points out that there are correlations of varying strength between the illocution-ary categories and sentence type: declaratives can be used for a wide variety of illocution-ary purposes (Declarations, Commissives, types of Directive) in addition to the realisationof Assertives; imperatives correlate more strongly with Directives, though they can be usedrhetorically for other purposes; interrogatives are prototypically correlated with Quaesi-tives, but can be used for other illocutions such as requests. Even where the correlation isstrong, it is not deterministic: illocutionary force is interpreted by the addressee on the as-sumption that speakers use the form which best expresses their communicative intentions.Within the pragmatic module, speaker intention, social context, discourse context andconventions for performing illocutionary acts all play a role. Liedtke (1998:121–125) dis-

cusses Austin’s (1962) distinction between locutionary and illocutionary acts, and withinthe locutionary, between phonetic, phatic and rhetic acts. He suggests that the divisionbetween grammatical and pragmatic modules coincides with that between the rhetic act(i.e. using words and constructions with a particular sense and reference) and the illocu-tionary act. He proposes to replace the illocutionary operator of Dik’s account by a rheticoperator, determining mood within the grammatical module.

Van den Berg (1998) makes the important point that the bottom-up approach of FGin modelling structure runs the risk of paying insufficient attention to the processes of lan-guage production: “FG is system-oriented and not user-oriented” (van den Berg 1998:77).His own model takes as its starting point the work of Berger & Luckmann (1971) on thesocial construction of reality, and that of Searle (1995) which is also concerned with socialand institutional facts. The brief summary of this work which follows is based on van denBerg (1998:78–85).

Berger & Luckmann’s theory is based on the concepts of habitualisation and typifi-cation: actions which are frequently repeated take on particular forms and become partof routines in our knowledge. Reciprocal recognition of these routines leads to reciprocaltypification. When habitualised actions, carried out by certain types of specific actors, arereciprocally typified, institutions arise, allowing us to anticipate typical activities occur-ring within them. The actors in typifications correspond to roles played in institutions

(e.g. the role of mother in the home, teacher in the school, judge in the courtroom): peo-ple share goals and standards of performance, and performance of the roles enacts theactions of the institution. Language is necessary for the development and transmission of institutions across generations. Roles become linguistically objectified as types of actor,routines as types of action. Van den Berg (1998:80) gives the example of a shop transac-tion, where both customer and salesperson know what sequence of actions, and what typesof linguistic behaviour, to expect. Van den Berg regards Searle’s work as complementingthat of Berger and Luckmann, in its emphasis on the relationship between social reality and the assignment of functions, such that, for example, a stone can act as (‘count as’, in

Searle’s formulation) a paperweight, or pieces of specially printed paper can be agreed, inthe social system, to count as money in a particular country.


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The linguistic structures composed of action types and their corresponding ac-tor types are used in discourse, of which conversation is the prototype. Van den Berg(1998:82) focuses on two functions of discourse: the recreation of social relationships(what Berger & Luckmann refer to as ‘universe maintenance’) and the ability of inter-actants to create relevance.

Van den Berg relates Berger & Luckmann’s action types to the predicate frames of FG,in which argument positions can be filled by names for natural or social objects. In caseswhere selection restrictions are violated, clues for interpretation will often be found in theinstitutional context. It is therefore necessary to create links between social institution, thebackground to the interaction, and the lexicon. The activation of a particular institution,such as when entering a shop, creates anticipation of routinised event sequences, and of other relevant social facts and objects:

It is the social context that accommodates a predicate frame and not a predicate framethat requires a coding that is independent of the social context.(van den Berg 1998:84)

Van den Berg’s own model of a pragmatic functional grammar postulates three modules,each provided with one or more ‘managers’ which regulate what happens within the mod-ule, as well as the interaction between modules. The pragmatic module is provided witha social context manager which has the task of constructing reality and a move managerwhich plans the relevant moves in discourse. The message module has a message man-ager which constructs the message. The grammar module has a predicate frame managerwhich is involved in the assignment of the predicate and terms. Van den Berg (1998:85)recognises that this model is an expansion of that proposed by Vet (1998a), the messagemodule being a more highly articulated version of Vet’s interface component.

The pragmatic module (van den Berg 1998:91–95) is the central controller, sendingboth information and instructions to the other two modules. First, the social context man-ager constructs a social reality which includes a specification of the institution and roles,the type of discourse and the status of move sequences. All this information is passedto the move manager, which is the ‘central processing unit’ of the pragmatic module. Itsrole is to construct moves (in principle, both verbal and non-verbal), and to translate thespeaker’s intent into appropriate semantic content, including the choice of a suitable il-

locutionary act. A call for this content is made to the grammatical module, which sendsthe appropriate illocutionary operator (DECL, INT, IMP), as well as the relevant actiontype (as embodied in a predicate frame), to the message manager for placement in a ‘mes-sage frame’. The predicate frame manager also has access to information regarding thesocial context, through its connection with the message module, and so can make any adjustments which may be required by the most recent contextual information available.

The message manager, as well as gathering content from the grammatical module,receives input from the social context manager (on institution, role, and the type, timeand location of the discourse) and from the move manager (on the kind of move beingplanned and types of discourse acts within the move). The message manager then coordi-nates the construction of a move which is in line with all these pieces of information. This


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process involves the setting up of a deictic centre and the distribution of responsibilitiesthrough the selection of names, pronouns, kinship terms or specifications of role type. Italso involves the placement of focus, generally on the new information being transmitted.The movement of elements from the grammatical component into the message frame ishandled by ‘specification rules’ in the message manager, which formulate constituents ac-cording to the requirements of the message. Finally, the expression rule component readsthe message frame and converts the specification into the final form of the utterance.

As we saw in §3.7.1 of Part 1, Hengeveld (forthcoming a, forthcoming b) has re-cently put forward a Functional Discourse Grammar model which attempts to integratethe underlying structure of the clause with that of the discourse. In the latest version of this model, any stretch of language can be analysed in terms of three linguistic levels:the interpersonal level, at the top of the hierarchy of levels, is intended to model lan-guage as a communicative process, while the representational level models language in its

content-carrying function, and the structural level is concerned with the realisation of thesemantics in form. Furthermore, the linguistic component is supplemented not only by an acoustic component dealing with the ultimate representation of meanings in sounds,but also by a conceptual component concerned with the development of the speaker’s in-tentions and their combination with appropriate conceptualisations, and by a contextualcomponent. Within such a model, it would appear that there is ample opportunity to dealwith indirect speech acts in terms of non-canonical mappings between the linguistic levels,motivated by information in the non-linguistic components of the model.

Finally, as we shall see in §2.2.2.2.1, the work of Bolkestein (1998) on the treatment of topicality and focality within FG also leads in the direction of a modular approach, as doesthat of Kroon (1995, 1997) on Latin connective particles (see §4.2.4), so strengthening thearguments from the area of illocution.

... ExclamationsIn recent work, Moutaouakil (1999) has proposed that what is regarded by Dik as excla-mative illocutionary force should be reanalysed as a kind of modality. He points out thatwhile declarative, interrogative and imperative constructions have formal features whichallow us to recognise them across languages, exclamations can take a wide range of dif-ferent forms in different languages, and indeed often within a single language. In English,

for example, exclamations can borrow declarative, interrogative and imperative syntax, asshown in (49)–(51) below.

(49) That’s fantastic! (BNC JYE 75)

(50) Isn’t that lovely! (BNC AEB 908)

(51) Look at that view! (BNC AT3 2518)

Moutaouakil (1999:3–6) goes on to argue that exclamation is not itself an illocution.It does not appear in the speech act typologies developed by Searle and others. Un-like Searle’s expressive category of speech acts, exclamations do not necessarily involvea propositional content which is itself related to the speaker or addressee. The fact that


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exclamations express a relationship between the speaker and the content of the utterance,rather than an interactional relationship between speaker and addressee, is also untypicalfor speech acts as a whole. Moutaouakil notes that although, in Dik’s account, declar-ative, interrogative and imperative constructions can undergo illocutionary conversion,there is no mention of any such conversion from exclamatives to another type. Further-more, although adverbs related to exclamative meaning do exist (Moutaouakil mentionssurprisingly , wonderfully and amazingly ), they modify the propositional content, not theillocution, as witness the strangeness of *I tell you amazingly that ... It is also claimed thatexclamations have different degrees, while a speech act is either performed or not. Finally,exclamatives have an illocutionary force, normally that of assertion, independently of theirexclamative status, as demonstrated by the facts that they can be conjoined with declara-tives, can occur in because clauses (unlike interrogatives and imperatives), take tags typi-cally added to declaratives, and are appropriately reacted to by the same type of expressions

as declaratives.Moutaouakil (1999:7–8) argues that exclamative meaning fits well into Dik’s category

of subjective epistemological modality, since it involves the speaker’s attitude towards theproposition. He also offers (pp. 8–12) a typology of exclamative modality. He first distin-guishes between appreciative and depreciative types, which are formally distinct in Stan-dard Modern Arabic and also in French, where it is claimed that only depreciative excla-mations can have a fronted adjective (Sotte/*géniale que tu es! (lit. ‘Stupid/*(full of) geniusthat you are!’), Moutaouakil’s example (36)). Moutaouakil (1999:9) motivates the dis-tinction between appreciative and depreciative exclamatory modality in English in termsof a purported difference in intonation contour. Reliable measurement of such contoursin connected discourse will be needed if this claim is to be upheld.

He also proposes degrees of exclamative modality which can be expressed lexically (e.g. through adjectives and adverbs in English) or grammatically (e.g. though predicateforms in Standard Modern Arabic encoding weaker and stronger types of exclamation). Itis further claimed that some languages, including French and Arabic, have means for thereinforcement of meaning expressed by a particular exclamative construction, usually by iconic addition of material as the strength of the exclamative meaning increases.

Moutaouakil (1999:12–15) suggests that exclamative modality is not confined to theproposition, but extends also to the term and to whole stretches of discourse. In (52)

we have an example, from Spanish, of what Moutaouakil would regard as exclamativemodality within the term.

(52) Qué What

faldaskirt

másmost

monapretty

llevas. (HCM 21, 402)wear-pres.2sg.familiar

‘What a pretty skirt you’re wearing’

Just as propositional exclamative modality

christopher s. butler structure and function a

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