Immediate recall as a secondary text: Referential parameters, pragmatics and propositions

Since the process of recalling combines comprehension and speech production, it is viewed as an extremely complex though understudied linguo-cognitive phenomenon. Recalls as secondary texts or text derivatives are also considered to be a good material to explore cognitive aspects of secondary texts production, information conversion procedures and types of transformations of primary texts. The notion of ‘secondary texts’ also implies multiplicity, as an original text may be retranslated into numerous secondary texts different in quality and degree of completeness. The purpose of the study is to model the propositional secondary retold texts and to identify the specifics of the recipients’ interpretation of the main event in the text. It is aimed at discriminating the differences between the primary expository text and its 134 immediate recalls produced by 15-year old native Russian speakers. In order to reveal the specifics of the propositional content of a primary expository text and its recalls, their recipients used the following methodological operations: the description and interpretation of the semantic roles of the first and second arguments aligned to predicates on the basis of the verbs’ semantic properties; the employment of the psycholinguistic model of the utterances generation; the characteristic of memory as a complex of cognitive and mnemic processes; the definition of cognitive-semantic discourse structures; and the understanding of a proposition as a stable component of an utterance independent of the surface grammar. The comparison of the original text and its recalls with the use of innovative “denotative maps” enabled us to define successful and unsuccessful expression of propositional structures and the main idea of the original text. The classification of texts includes four groups based on the number of the reproduced propositions and types (weak or successful) of the reflection of the primary text denotative card. The authors designed and successfully implemented an innovative 11 stage-algorithm of revealing patterns of a printed text comprehension and its immediate recalls including the primary visual perception of the text, its primary interpretation, reading, encoding, reflection, preparation for an oral presentation, desobjectivation (distribution of semantic roles), interpretation, reflection, oral implementation and text. The work fills in certain gaps in the research, such as the specifics of immediate recalls production, identification of changes in propositional structures of immediate recalls, and expanding the corpus of semantic roles similar to Frame Net. The findings can be successfully applied in natural language processing and linguistic didactics.