ABSTRACT
This conclusion presents some closing thoughts on the concepts covered in the preceding chapters of this book. The book presents the the steps by which the grammar should be constructed given the communicative process without a priori knowledge, and checked their consistency with the data as they stand. It utilizes data from French and Italian to introduce the notion that temporality and modality are fused into a single dimension. However, the evidence used to support the notion, the difficulty children have with ongoing actions that begin in the past and the strong potentiality element in their references to the future, was taken exclusively from English. The book highlights the subject noun phrase, verb, object noun phrase order that is dominant in English, and intimated in passing that other languages differ. Cross-language surveys like J. H. Greenberg and S. Steele have amply confirmed this, even if we restrict ourselves to the dominant orders that virtually all languages appear to possess.
