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Sentence Plans

Sentence Plans




In planning a sentence, a speaker has many options. As described in Chapter 1, these fall into three categoties: propositional content, illocutionary contet, and thematic structure. First, what states or events does the speaker want to talk about?  A boy hitting a ball, a dinosaur romping through swamps, Julia discovering a virus? These come under the heading of propostional contet. Second how does he want to deal with it? Does he want to make a assertion, a request, a promise, or what?  This is question of illocutionary contet, and reflects the, speech act the speaker intends to make. Third, what does the speaker want as subject, what does he think the listener does and does not know, and what framework does he want to set his utterance in? These are questions that have to do with thematic structure. The speaker must decide on all three aspects before he can compose a sentence. Planning sentence-deciding on these three aspects-requires problem solving that is just as complicated as planning discourse. The problem to be solved remains the same: what linguistic devices should speakers select to have the intended effect on the listener? But speakers have new considerations to take into account. These include: How are states and events to be conceived of? What are their precise intentions in uttering a sentence at this time? And how much can they assume the listener knows of what is being talked about ? the problems encountered by speakers are different for propositional contet, illocutionary contet, and thematic structure, and so they will be taken up separately.

Propositional Contet
At the core of the sentence to be planned are its propositions-units of meaning that reflect the ideas speakers want to express. Before speakers can assert, ask questions, promise, or commad, they have to something to assert, ask questions, promise, or commad about. An apartment description, for example, might break down into a series of propositions description, for example, might break down into a series of propositions such as these:
          Your enter the door
          The door is at the front
          The bedroom is left oh the hallway
and so on. Before these unadorned propositions can be realized as sentences they must be usefully combined and given illocutionary contet and thematic structure. The result might be an assertion, You are entering the front door, or a request, Enter the front door. And the result can very in frame and insert, as in A bedroom is on the left versus On the left is a bedroom.

Experiential Chunking
The first problem that speakers have to solve might be called the problem of experiential chunking, a problem alluded to in discourse plans. Imagine that Charlotte has just watched a movie clip of a knight slaying a dragon and is asked to describe it. In planning this short discourse, she has to decide on the level content, order, and relations of her description. The propositions underlying her description might be these:
          The knight watched the dargon. The knight approached the dragon. The knight picked up asword. The knight swung the sword. The sword pierecd the dragon. The dragon fell. The dragon died.



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