Publications

Publication details [#2056]

Chafe, Wallace L. 1977. The recall and verbalization of past experience. In Cole, Roger W., ed. Current issues in linguistic theory. Indiana UP. pp. 215–246.
Publication type
Article in book
Publication language
English

Annotation

C. addresses the question of how we are able to take nonverbal experience, store it away for a while, and then recall it and turn it into words that communicate to other people something of what the experience was like. He discusses the processes of subchunking (i.e. the breaking down of larger chunks of content into smaller ones), propositionalizing (i.e. deciding on a propositional structure assigning various roles to the objects involved in the chunk) and categorizing (i.e. finding the appropriate words or phrases to communicate the ideas). The study is meant to show that there cannot be such a thing as an autonomous semantic structure underlying a discourse or a sentence, but that talking is a creative process.