Discourse organization and sentence form: The structure of room descriptions in Dutch∗

Abstract

An important characteristic of spoken language is its linear order. When describing something as common as a living room, a speaker is faced with an organization problem: he must express three‐dimensional information in a one‐dimensional medium. In this study, discourse organization was experimentally manipulated by presenting subjects with different miniature living room arrangements and different task instructions. A linguistic analysis of the descriptions examined the speaker's use of linearization and formulation strategies. Linearization was found to be organized at the paragraph and utterance levels. On each level, two different linearization principles were found, depending on the amount of functionality in the room. Formulation strategies operate on the level of individual utterances and bring about particular variations in syntax and lexical choice. This study investigates such formulation properties as word order, pronominalization, and determination. It also gives some insights into the choice between certain syntactic variants, such as main clauses and ellipsis. All the formulation properties studied are analyzed in terms of discourse organization processes, i.e., in terms of discourse segmentation and discourse linearization.