The Power of Words in Message Planning

Before engaging in a conversation , a message must be planned. While there are many ways to perform this task, I believe that people do this in the following way, in particular if the message is going to be long: first an outline is planned (global, or skeleton planning), which is then filled in with details (local planning, elaboration). Planning proceeds thus from general to specific (breadth first), that is, sentences are planned incremen-tally by gradual refinement of some abstract thought rather than in one go (one-shot process) where every element is planned down to its last details. While global planning is largely language independent, local planning can be language dependent: the dictionary acts a mediator , interfacing language and thought. Given the fact that words can be used to specify non linguistic thought, there is feedback from the lexical to the conceptual component. This being so, dictionaries may play a fundamental role in guiding and potentially modifying non linguistic thought. If my view is correct, this could have implications on the design of generation architectures: instead of separating message planning and realization, viewing the process as being strictly sequential, we could allow for feedback loops (interleaved process), whereby the linguistic component could feed back to the conceptual component.