The relations (which Schank calls "conceptual dependencies") enable the combination of these elements to form conceptualizations. Two fundamental relations are agent-action and action-object. Although either of these pairs may be realized in language, often they are combined to form an agent-action-object conceptualization. This would most commonly be represented in the English language by a subject-verb-object syntactic form (e.g., John hit the ball). It is important to note, however, that the same conceptualizations can also be realized in language in other forms (e.g., the ball was hit by John; hitting the ball was what John did) and even in other words with only slight changes in meaning (e.g., John struck the ball with a bat). The point is that it is the conceptualization and not the language which is the primary and salient factor in the various representations.

Examples of other conceptual dependencies and how they might be realized in the English language are:

Of course, a single complex sentence may have many of these relations in its underlying conceptualizations. Also, this list is not meant to be complete; not all possible conceptualizations are included. However, Schank and others who work in this area believe that a complete list of relations would not be overwhelmingly large. Whether or not this is so remains to be seen. In any event, for present purposes the relations mentioned provide concrete examples of one type of approach currently being used to operationally specify the elements of an abstract conceptual base, and to specify the relationships among these elements and the signs and syntactical rules for realizing (representing or expressing) conceptualizations formed from these elements in the spoken language system.

The idea that the formulation of conceptualizations is the primary goal of languaging is suggested by several studies which show that, when people aud or read, the original form of a sentence is stored only for the short time necessary for comprehension to occur. Then, once a semantic interpretation (ie., a conceptualization) is made, the meanings, not the linguistic forms, are retained in memory (e.g., Sacks, 1967; Bransford and Franks, 1971; Bransford, Barclay, and Franks, 1972; Bransford and McCarrell, 1972; Perfetti and Garson, 1973). Thus we consider that the auder or reader formulates conceptualizations from spoken or written sentences. These are then integrated with previous knowledge in long-term memory, and an organized base of conceptual elements is formed in memory. Later on, these elements may be retrieved, during the process of conceptualizing, to form the basis for the production of new sentences by languaging.