The appeal of the PDC program

Abstract

Comments on an article by M. C. MacDonald (see record [rid]2013-20854-001[/rid]). MacDonald’s Production-Distribution-Comprehension project (PDC) is similar in some ways to what I was trying to do in my lectures, but it is more ambitious, for several reasons. MacDonald presents in her paper, but it seems like a natural extension. My Brevity strategy doesn’t seem to follow from MacDonald’s proposals, but it does seem like something that could reduce the memory demands in production. We agree that audience design plays a role in production (MacDonald, 2013), but that its role is much smaller than many other researchers have suggested; note in particular how limited my strategy is. Finally, we also agree that ambiguity avoidance is overrated. Despite my enthusiasm for the PDC program, it faces many challenges. In my remaining space, I will sketch three (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2016 APA, all rights reserved)