A central issue of cognitive studies of text production is What goes on in people's minds when they produce a text?, How do they plan the text?, How do they decide in what order to express their thoughts? In this volume, writers are followed in their footsteps during the moment-to-moment process of producing routine business letters. Their writing processes are explored in real time with the ultimate goal to contribute to a cognitive theory of text production. Such a theory should tell what kind of mental structures underly text production, how these structures are converted into coherent texts, and how this process is framed within real writing time.
The study starts from a large corpus of real-life text production processes. It combines methods to explore both process and product of text production. Processes are described by analyzing the pause patterns that emerge in the course of writing. Products are described by analyzing their hierarchical structure. Together, these descriptions yield several significant insights in the real time organization of cognitive processes in production.
The study can be characterized as a cognitive linguistic approach to text production. This volume will be of special interest to researchers in the field of (psycho-)linguistics, textlinguistics and cognitive science.