The Blueprint of a Speaker | Part 3 of 6 | Grammatical Encoding

Grammatical encoding is the process of taking in a preverbal message (the “mental concept” as it exists prior to describing it with words) and producing surface structures as output based on the activation and usage of singular and syntactic words and their “rules” as are held in the mental lexicon (the mental vocabulary).

Each and every word that we use has syntactic rules attached to it that determine how it interacts with other words. The rule are interactive in themselves, meaning that they can change depending on what rules they are presently attached to as a result of being placed in junction with another word. The words have a left to right ordering and are incrementally generated from the preverbal message. These syntactic words are called “lemmas” for short.

The surface structure that I mentioned just shortly ago is largely lexically driven. This means that in an interactive way, as the words are selected, they need to be attached to the other words in a way that meshes with all of the other grammatical rules that are attached to each of the lemmas combined in the sentence. So the rules for A need to match the rules for B and the rules for B need to match the rules for C and so on…

To make this more difficult, the mental lexicon contains plenty of multiple-word lemmas. Phrases such as put-your-money-where-your-mouth-is or where-the-rubber-meets-the-road are multiple word lemmas that have a single meaning and as such have syntactical rules that apply to the phrase rather than each word.

So how are lemmas selected? I am glad you asked this… The “Production Lexicon” is the model that represents the process of creating the surface structure necessary for us to speak the generated phrases. It consists of three separate levels, the conceptual stratum, the lemma stratum and the form stratum.

At the conceptual level, a word or phrase is represented along with other closely related word and all of their grammatical rules. The lemma statum is where the actual word is chosen based on the best option. The For stratum is where the actual sequential layout of the phrase is developed and again this layout is based on the interactive rules that are occurring based on the sequential lemma selection.

The actual decision that is made about which word and structure to use is based on “roots” and “feet”. This is an extremely rudimentary explanation, but sufficient for our purposes here. The root is the cental concept/word/structure applying to a word or phrase. The feet are the outlying rules/meanings that are attached to a word or phrase. For instance, the word “school” literally means a building where teaching occurs, it is a noun, for the sentence to make sense a noun needs a verb, etc… (this is the root). “School” can also be a verb as in “to school someone”, this has it’s own set of rules (this is a foot).

So lets say your central concept (conceptual stratum) is “school”. At the conceptual level, school is chosen rather than fire department, concert hall, store, etc… The root of school is now the anchor from which the word selection will start.

Depending on what is to be conveyed about “school”, the feet of “school” will determine which lemmas will be chosen at the lemma stratum. In this case it is some place to go, so it will be a noun(a foot) rather than an action/verb such as “schooling”(another foot). The first lemma that is chosen is then going to supply the root for the form stratum.

At the form stratum, the actual word “SCHOOL” versus the other possibilities of schooling, schooled, etc…(all feet) is chosen based on the root from the lemma stratum selection.

This, my friends is how grammatical encoding occurs within the speakers mind. In my next post we will talk about the actual morpho-phonological encoding of speech. Until next time…

David J. Parnell | The Communication Expert