The theory of text worlds

Like the other cognitive approaches treated in the chapters above, Text World Theory provides a new way of understanding the mind's complex yet organised responses to any textual encounter, especially what occurs below the level of conscious awareness. This particular theory of discourse processing has developed out of Cognitive Grammar, so has a linguistic origin, but has application beyond Linguistics because it looks well above the level of the sentence to the whole text. It assumes that to understand language we have to conceptualise its propositions; to create coherence from extended pieces of discourse, we have to keep track of those propositions in a systematic way, make inferences from them as a whole, and synthesise them with customised selections from stored knowledge. Text World Theory explains how this involved cognitive process works, by claiming that people make sense of discourse through the creation of mental representations of the ideas provoked by that discourse. These representations are not just images, but rather, they are conceptual systems that provide a way of managing and integrating collections of propositions. The mental representations created are seen within this framework as provisional worlds that must be imagined and then continuously updated in order to make sense of the text at hand, and to accommodate its emerging premises and assumptions. The process of creating coherence from these scenarios is cumulative and adaptive: the reader incrementally takes information from the text, with which general knowledge, stored schemas, inferencing and acts of the imagination are selectively combined within the reading process. The results include an evolving and custom-made discourse context and a collaborative act of meaning-making.