An integrated view of text planning

The influences of various conceptual and linguistic phenomena on a text's structure are examined: exploitation of conversational implicature, performing aggregation of propositions with common parts, and impacts on the text structure caused by the repertoire of expressing conceptual specifications in terms of lexical items.

Abstract

Augmenting the currently dominating view of text planning, which is essentially understood as planning the organization of a text's structure, this paper presents an approach that integrates this part of the generation process into a broader context. The influences of various conceptual and linguistic phenomena on a text's structure are examined: exploitation of conversational implicature, performing aggregation of propositions with common parts, and impacts on the text structure caused by the repertoire of expressing conceptual specifications in terms of lexical items. Their integration is supported by adopting the view of handling several versions of text structures. They range from a concise, redundancy-free, and entirely explicit version, termed as argumentative structure to a version of the more usual kind of text structures, which widely mirrors the surface text finally produced. The approach is demonstrated by the generation of an explanation of medium complexity, and the impacts on the text structure in each processing step are illustrated.