Deriving Discourse from Sentences: An Experimental Study

Abstract

Widdowson discussed how to derive discourse (a meaningful paragraph) from a set of sentences in arbitrary syntactic forms. To make an empirical examination of his discussion, the author presented five native speakers of English with the same set of sentences and asked them to convert the sentences into a meaningful piece of discourse. The results supported Widdowson's discussion, showing that the attainment of proper propositional development could be realized through proper reduction of redundancy, use of cohesive items, use of 'given' and 'new' information structure, and combining or re-ordering of sentences. However, the fact that the five subjects came up with more or less different set of new sentences suggested that the emendation was affected by each subject's prior knowledge or ideas about the propositional contents.