"Act promptly, make your god happy"" Representation and 
Rhetorical Relations in Natural Language Generation 
Margaret N. Hundleby 
School of Engineering/UGuelph 
Guelph, Ontario N1G 1X6 Canada 
Tile Sumerian proverb in the title is invoked by Julian Jaynes (1976) as he documents the laborious 
process of coming to consciousness. This activity is the cognitive labor that enables us to arrive 
at a question about the precise relationship between two types of knowledge, or ask if "rhetorical 
relations \[are\] the realizations of intentions, or should . . . be discarded as simply a misconstrual 
of intentions proper?" It is the legacy of that arrival we are discussing when we raise issues around 
intentionality, and I do not think it is coincidental that the proverb quoted in Jaynes' investigation 
ca.n be read in its English translation as being among the earliest evidence for a clMm of a mental 
state of intentionality: not only does the proverb denmnstrate that we possess a state of awareness 
about "how to live", it also presents that consciousness as the instilling of action coincident with the 
having of the mental state. The "god" whispers to the other half of the bicameral brain; the ability 
to act lodged there responds as to a direct physiological stinmlus. What is not quite so obvious 
is that, as the presence of intention makes itself known, so do the effects of a necessary rhetorical 
relationship. This paper takes the position that rhetorical knowledge is embedded in intentional 
knowledge, and that the two can be said not merely to have a close relationship but to interact 
demonstrably in a reflexive one. 
The difficulty of dealing with intention vis-a-vis rhetorical relations rests first in making the as- 
sumption that either or both exist and affect language use to greater or lesser degrees, as several 
of the abstracts collected here debate. Of rnore concern for this discussion, however, seems to be 
the acknowledgement at least tacit in most of the papers that extending language constructs into 
language construction involves multiple levels of implication and/or complex interweavings of ele- 
ments. In short, we are having the present discussion because this second requirement arises from 
our dealing with language in use, mad not language as an object for analysis, as Sanders particularly 
points out. Implicitly as well as explicitly we are assuming that our inquiries are about the operation 
of language, and cannot be answered by a simple system indicating unidirectional (non-recursive) 
coherence, nor in settling for a two-part classifieaton of text as information and persuasion. 
As a result, this contribution begins with an orientation toward language use as social action (Heap, 
1989b) and seeks to account for intentions/rhetorical relations in natural language generation as a 
matter of both the multiple goals of discourse (Kinneavy, 1980) and dynamic character of language 
use-shown, for example, in Conversation Analysis (Sacks, Schegloff, and Jefferson, 1974)-rather 
than by description of linguistic objects. A major concern, then, is to understand language-use-as- 
44 
discourse both in action and as action, highlighting its resulting "aboutness". To begin to do so here, 
I will examine the ways in which the proverb, an artefact of a much earlier world in which thinking 
and acting had not been declared separate entities, is about the intentional state, and demonstrates 
an embedded rhetorical relationship which is also its agency of intentional action. 
First, let us accept a definition of "intentional" as being involved in cognitive activity based on wishes 
and desires and proceeding through "directions of fit" and "conditions of satisfaction" (Searle, 1983). 
Such mental being is at the core of this Sumerian wisdom. The whisper of the god indicates having 
the desire to act, the thinking; the reception or hearing, the understanding, of that whisper shows 
the direction of fit by yielding advice to do something, in this case to "act". Thus, the proverb 
demonstrates conditions of satisfaction rising both from the injunction to promptness and from the 
expected out-come-"make your god happy". Taking the proverb as a text of the intentional state, 
we can examine the function of the rhetorical relations tacit to the intentionality's existcnce as a 
text. 
For, puttiug forward claims about the function of rhetorical relations begins with a prior claim, 
that intentionality possesses representation in itself. To speak or write in relation to the intentional 
state is to deal in the representation of representation (Searle, 1983). We must be extremely carefill 
with the distinctions we make here, however. It is highly tempting to see representation as only 
a container for "stateness". Both communication theory based on "encoding" concepts and casual 
location of speech acts as posterior to intention result in seeing language as somehow "representative 
of", with sets of signa acting as carriers, sent from a cognitive site through a conduit called text 
(Frawley,1988). But in this proverb, we have a topic of cognitive relations echoed exactly in the 
activity of the rhetorical ones: the thinking, understanding and acting of text production-inventing, 
arranging, styling-are present as material relations of the thinking, understanding and acting present 
as the substance of the proverb. Formulating a statement on "how to live" is not a message relayed 
or translated, but an entry into an intentional state effected because there has been entry into an 
intentional state. Entry is, quite simply, an action accompanied by a set of strategies for designing 
behavior under material coaditions-making semantic choices, applying the rules of syntax, choosiag 
formats and internal arrangements to create the objects we think of as documents and to render the 
"aboutness" we find in the rhetorical relations its text owns. 
The conclusion approaching through the line of reasoning I am taking meshes with Searle's ob- 
servation that the intentional state requires being able to be present as conditions (p. 23). These 
conditions can take many forms-pronomenalization, juxtaposition, paralleling, arranging as a string, 
arranging as a block, turning into graphics. Doing so has created what is usually identified as the 
relations of logic (Morrison, 1988) and customarily taken as the nature, and effect, of rhetorical 
relations. But whether we identify them as expression, analysis, logic or any other category, consid- 
ering these relations as a matter of intentional representation requires that we see them as design 
for action. Making language choices and/or constructing a text is not a matter of realizing inten- 
tionality, but of intentionality's being present, under conditions. Acts of design clean up "physical 
messiness" as a matter of releasing the tacit into the explicit (Dennett, 1988). Intentionality and 
rhetorical relations share a presence of active connection-thinking toward acting on the one hand, 
and acting toward thinking on the other. Mutual support results, and also mutual dependence, or 
reflexiveness: each is the set of conditions of the other being present, in the world. 
And what, then, is the role of language? Since language consists ofsigna, it nmst be a representation- 
at least in its semantic aspects-and, ia turn, provides representation of the representatioa through 
45 
ordering it as grammar and syntax. But this is the aspect under which we study language-as-object, 
not language-in-use, and tend to treat parole with the set of analytic devices applicable to langue 
(Saussure, 1972). They are not, however, interchangable phases of the character of language, and 
mixing them up tends to obviate the operation of language as a system of signs-that it provides 
tile grounds of and claims for representation through which we, quite simply, accomplish knowing 
about (Addis, 1989). Thus, the formulation of intention and its presentation within tile context 
of discourse (Iicap, 1989a) are both required to accomplish tile work of the first major phase of 
language-in-use, its "aboutness", in which intention and rhetoric reflexively generating the content 
of discourse. 
In addition, my own work with writing and speaking for scientific purposes has shown me that 
intentional knowledge cannot be made fully to be present unless there is some accommodation for 
mode of awareness: that is, what is represented is seldom of concern to the system of representing, 
but how to represent, the mode, is crucial for purposive communicaton. That is, we cannot graft a 
language sys tern onto intentionality, but we can eml)loy its modality-iconic, indexical or symbolic 
(Frawley, 1988)-as the agency for discourse relations (Burke, 1962). Taking into account the iconic, 
visual character of language used in engineeriag design as the evidence of its rhetoric means taking 
into account the direction of fit as evidenced in the language condition under which intentional states 
appear phenomenonally (MNH, 1992). As Dennett notes, there is little evidence that the relationship 
is syntactic (p.216), or even, I think, a "logical" one (MNH, 1991). We tend to accept descriptions 
from linguistic science-those emphasizing logical relations as fundamental to having meaning-just 
because syntax produces a phenomenon accounted logical (Morrison,1988) and seemingly consonant 
with "arrangement", the rhetorical relation most literally, and thus obviously, acting to order the 
iuchoate. More uscfifl is tile potential of Dennett's "economies" and other relational action that 
introduces at least, tile possibility of recursiveness, as germane to the conditions of this or that 
intentionality, both necessary and reflexive to intentionality, and knowledge, being preseut at all. 

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