Unspecified verbs and adverbs

In an unspecified verb it is not clear how the action creates or created the result.

Example 1:

• Client: "I created a great impression on them."
• Response: "How exactly did you create a great impression (and note the unspecified referential index “them”) on who exactly?"
• Note: The appropriate response is to ask how exactly does taking "x" action lead to "y" result.

Example 2:

• Client: "My students are failing me."
• Respondent: "Failing, how?"

Unspecified verbs and adverbs let us fill in with our own experience.

• "This is much easier to learn than it looks at first."
• "People can relax."

We don't know how it is easier to learn, or how it looks at first. Nor do we know how people relax, nor how they can do it. But we can imagine how. According to my English Teacher at Primary School a verb is a doing word or an action word. In other words, verbs describe actions or things being done. Just like all the other words that we humans use when we communicate with each other, verbs are simple labels used to describe complex aspects of human experience.

When a person uses verbs in their linguistic communication they are in posession of all the underlying complex experience that gives meaning to the words (their Reference Structure), so they know exactly the meaning of the words that they use. We, as the recipient of that communication do not have access to that Reference Structure - for us all of that data has effectively been deleted.

Consider the following phrase:- 'They punished me'.

This Surface Structure is derived from a fuller linguistic representation known as the Deep Structure. The Deep Structure, in turn, is derived from the Reference Structure of the speaker i.e. the speaker's World Model.

In order to appreciate more fully what the speaker means by 'They punished me' we could apply meaning to the words from our own world model. We could think about experiences we've had to which the label 'punished' could be applied and imagine that this is what the speaker means. We could think about experiences that other people have had that we've heard or read about which could fit the description of 'punished'. Both of these methods are flawed insomuch as they amount to mind reading - claiming to know the thoughts of another person.

The underlying Deep Structure of the above Surface Structure could be written as:- PAST(PUNISH [someone, me, in some way])

Any native speaker of the English language understands from the Surface Structure that:-

1. Some event occured in the past
2. The event was a complex event
3. It consisted of the following parts:-
   1. An action, punished, which occurred between:
      1. The agent - some person or thing doing the punishing, here represented by they, and
      2. The object - some person or thing being punished, here represented by me, and
      3. The instrument - the method used to do the punishing, here represented by in some way

Notice that even though not all parts of the Deep Structure represented appear in the Surface Structure (in this case the instrument is not represented in the Surface Structure), the native speaker of English has that information available in their understanding of the sentence.

Meta Model questions/responses can be used effectively to recover the information deleted from the Deep Structure. In this particular case an appropriate question would be:-

• 'How specifically did they punish you?'.

And if we wanted to recover the missing Referential Index on 'They' we could ask:-

• 'Who specifically punished you?'

By recovering deleted information we can gain greater specificity and thus access to the fullest linguistic representation of the Deep Structure.

Sources: http://nlpglossary.blogspot.com/search/label/Unspecified%20Verb http://home.earthlink.net/~nlper999/miltmod.html#nom http://www.microdot.net/nlp/precise-communication/

<<snapshot print label:print id:here>>