Abstract
This chapter is a sketch towards a general model of the language production process in different modalities, with special reference to the dynamic interaction between language and thought. The model, it is argued, must take the temporal, social and cognitive organization of the language production process into account.
Special attention is given the external representation and its affordances, that is, what the spoken or written representation offers the speaker or writer to do. For the purpose of demonstration, three different situations of language production are subjected to contrastive analysis: a predominantly monological discourse in a spoken and a written condition derived from a narrative task; a genuinely dialogical spontaneous spoken discourse; and the writing of a poem.
Further, the paper proposes a partly new conceptual approach: that of seeing language production basically as a process of drafting – in writing as well as in speech. In effect, text-writing can be said typically to be a solitary drafting process where revisiting and reinterpreting one’s own previous discourse is essential to developing the text, whereas spoken conversation is typically a joint drafting process where attention to one’s co-speaker’s reactions is essential to developing the discourse.
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Acknowledgements
I want to extend a special thanks to Victoria Johansson, Herbert Clark and Dan Slobin for inspiring discussions of many of the issues addressed in this paper. Also, a warm thanks to the members of the Linneaus excellence centre “Thinking in Time – Cognition, Communication and Learning” at Lund university for fruitful feedback.
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Strömqvist, S. (2022). On the Nature of Language Production – Towards a General Model. In: Levie, R., Bar-On, A., Ashkenazi, O., Dattner, E., Brandes, G. (eds) Developing Language and Literacy. Literacy Studies, vol 23. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-99891-2_7
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