Descriptions in route directions (in the English language)

The aim of this article is to present the research into descriptive component in the content of route directions, which involves clarification of this term, ascertaining its functional scope, and defining its role in the content of route directions. In the content of route directions, instruction is prioritized over description by most researchers. Descriptive component is mostly analyzed in the context of landmarks, which downplays its importance in verbal representation of the route. From theoretical perspective the research contributes to the body of knowledge about the interaction between two systems: perception of space and production of discourse about space. The results of the research may be useful for solving the challenge of bringing computer-generated route descriptions more in line with those provided by humans. The study into the specificity of verbalizing knowledge about space allows us to define route directions as a type of discourse about space that is produced in the situation of cognitive and communicative interaction, is based upon subjective choice of elements of environment and verbal language for them, and is underspecified. These features account for both conceptual and linguistic flexibility of the components of route directions. In descriptions of spatial semantics, there exists a number of primitive semantic concepts that can be applied to characterization of spatial language. Their use in this research leads to the definition of route directions as verbal localization of path in a certain environment. Path broadly understood as a trajectory of motion of the trajector with respect to the landmark is a route-forming constituent. From this perspective, the functional scope of descriptions in route directions can be determined on the basis of their role in verbal localization of the path. In route directions on the sites of the UK national parks, the parts that have no explication of actions typical for instructions were marked and categorized as descriptions. As a result of further analysis, two categories of descriptions were discovered and described. The distinction was based on their role in localizing the path. These categories are: 1) descriptions that do not define the path in the narrow sense but are complementary; 2) descriptions that inform of the environment and simultaneously localize the path of the trajector's motion in it. As a result, the research discovered differences between the categories under consideration in two aspects: in functional load (the second category has two functions: it describes the environment and implicitly instructs the way-searcher), in relevance (providing the structural unity of the route the second category has a higher degree of relevance than the first one). In summary, the role of descriptions in route directions is not only to provide the mental image of the environment where way is searched, which is essential in itself, but also to verbally localize the path.

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