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The functional perspective At the Interpersonal Level, the hierarchically highest unit of analysis is
the Move, which is made up of one or more Discourse Acts;12 each Discourse Act contains an Illocution, i.e. the specification of a relation between the Participants in the speech act (the Speaker and the Addressee) and some Communicated Content; the latter is comprised of one or more Subacts, which are either Referential or Ascriptive (Hengeveld & Mackenzie, 2008: 15). In accordance with the depth-first principle, linguistic expressions whose function directly maps onto a phonological form with no need for any further processing are sent immediately to the Output Component for articulation: this is the case of expressives (e.g. wow ) and other invariable expressions (e.g. thanks, congratulations), whose phonological form is already available at the Interpersonal Level (ibid., pp. 76–78). The Representational Level pertains to the semantic representation of the utterance. The linguistic units of analysis distinguished at this level correspond to categories of meaning: the hierarchically highest unit is the Propositional Content, itself comprised of one or more episodes; each episode may in turn contain one or more descriptions of States-of-Affairs. Statesof-Affairs contain one or more Properties, which may be predicated either of Individuals (e.g. first-order entities) or of other Properties (Hengeveld & Mackenzie, 2008: 15). The same category of meaning, e.g. a Property, may have different functions, i.e. it may be ascribed or referred to. The Property of being tall, for instance, is referred to by the noun tallness and may be predicated of some other Individual or Property by using the adjective tall : the formal difference between the noun tall and the adjective tallness pertains to the Morphosyntactic Level (ibid., p. 16). Even Individuals, e.g. the assumedly specific referent of the phrase my best friend, may be ascribed or referred to, as in examples (1a) and (1b), respectively. (1) English (Hengeveld & Mackenzie, 2008: 16) a. Sheila is my best friend. (Ascription) b. My best friend visited me last night. (Reference) The Morphosyntactic Level is the first level of encoding. Here, linguistic 12
The Discourse Act is considered the basic unit of analysis on the grounds of crosslinguistic evidence showing that a typologically valid grammatical theory must take into account linguistic units “larger than the individual clause� (Hengeveld & Mackenzie, 2008: 1, 3f.).