PRECURSOR THOUGHT-FRAGMENTS TO SPEECH -

 PRECURSOR THOUGHT-FRAGMENTS TO SPEECH  - 

Here is a small theory about what part of a sentence comes to mind before it is uttered (or framed just before it is uttered). 

Suppose you and I are travelling in a car and we happen to pass by a school. I say to you - 

“This was my school till grade 5”. 

Now, there are 2 parts to this sentence - The Understanding-intensive part and the Knowledge/Fact-intensive part. The factual parts are ‘This’ (signifying its this building), ‘was’ (signifying what I am telling was in the past), ‘my’ (signifying it was mine), ‘school’ (signifying it to be a place of learning we all go to), ‘grade 5’ (signifying the 5th level of learning gradation standard). The understanding or reason-intensive part is the word ‘till’.

The ‘till’ is the stitch. The rest are just static items, which might as well have been something else also. The stitch is the connector of the 2 sets of chunks (on the left and right of it, here). 

Always, in sentences, the “small-words” like till, until, upon, at, around, about, onto, on etc. are the understanding-intensive parts. They are the stitches - the connectors. They are the zones in the sentence where the critical understanding part of the sentence lies. As said before, the rest of the chunks could be anything. The sentence might as well have been “Don't move till I signal”. Here the critical understanding part still remains to be the “till”. This is the thinking component in the cognition of the sentence.

When we are generating something in the mind, to speak, in the mind, the first part that happens is the reason-intensive part. That's what's linked to the thought that inspires what's to be said. 

That engages the brain-resources the most - more than the factual elements (knowledge-parts). 

Here, the first part that comes to mind is “till grade 5”. Note that the stitch is accompanied by one of the sets of chunks (‘grade 5’). That's the key part, in my view, of what's conceptualised, as something to be said.

When you say “Today I am going to sleep without the blanket”, the inception of the thought corresponds to “Without the blanket”, which is the first-generated part, before the speech. The ‘without’ is the stitch - the connector - the reason-intensive part.

Another consequence of these stitches is that the “mostly/typically-following-up-parts” to sentences i.e. the kinds of things that are mostly/typically spoken as a response by the other person to an uttered sentence are inspired by these stitches. We talked about speaking above. Responding is similar. We process sentences as being composed of 2 kinds of parts - knowledge-intensive parts and reason-intensive parts, when words are thrown at us. The reason-intensive part is what is picked up as the centre of cognition around which the understanding of the sentence is built. The response follows / is inspired by this reason-intensive part. In the case of the grade 5 sentence, the typical follow-up is - “and after grade 5?” In the case of the blanket sentence, the most conspicuously noticed part would be “without the blanket” and the response would be focussed on that “why without the blanket?”