Verbal planning in route directions
Wolfgang Klein · 1980
This study is part of a larger project that is undertaken at the MaxPlanck Projektgruppe Psycholinguistics at Nijmegen. It deals with the role of situational and verbal context, on the one hand, and with complex language production on the other. More specifically, I am interested in the use of deictical expressions, as a particularly important type of context-dependent expressions, and in the way people perform complex verbal tasks. In the present context, I shall only be concerned with the second aspect, namely with complex verbal actions in which certain tasks are solved. By complex verbal action, I understand activities like giving a talk, telling a narrative, explaining a game, describing an apartment, arguing together, etc. In general, several participants, at least two, are engaged in such an action, but their roles may be different. According to that, I classify them into basically monological and basically non-monological ones (giving a talk is basically monological, arguing together is basically non-monological); a complex verbal action might indeed be composed of several passages, some of them being monological, some not. A second subdivision follows the type of information to be presented or elaborated: it may prestructure the verbal planning to a high or a low degree. Narratives are strongly prestructured by the temporal order of events, explaining games is weakly prestructured; that's why most people soon get confused when they try to explain a complex game. In the weakly prestructured case, people typically try to introduce some temporal ordering, for example by following the running of the game, by imagining a tour through an apartment (Linde & Labov, 1975), and so on.