Abstract

Text World Theory is a cognitive model of human discourse processing. It is a highly interdisciplinary approach and is influenced by a range of different fields, including cognitive psychology, possible worlds logic, cognitive linguistics, and stylistics. Its basic premise is that human beings process and understand discourse by constructing mental representations, or ‘text worlds’, of it in their minds. The text world approach to discourse study was originally formulated by Paul Werth in the 1990s, primarily in relation to literary discourse. More recently, however, Text World Theory has been used as a means of analyzing a broad range of discourse types, from street directions to newspaper language. This article explains the basic mechanics of Text World Theory and provides an introduction to the three main levels of the framework: discourse worlds, text worlds, and sub-worlds.

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