Text World Theory
What IS Text World Theory? Well, one could state simply that it’s ‘a cognitive-linguistic model of human discourse processing’. Or one could go over to the new Text World Theory site from where I extracted that definition and find out much more. On the site, you can access not only Paul Werth’s Text Worlds: Representing Conceptual Space in Discourse (for research purposes), but also Professor Jo Gavins has very generously made available Text World Theory: An Introduction.
The feeling of being so immersed in a text-world as almost to lose sense of who and where we are is familiar to just about anyone who has ever read a novel. We can populate our text-worlds with living, breathing, thinking characters, carrying out complex physical and mental activities, in authentic material surroundings. We are able to predict and replicate human behaviour, while at the same time remaining susceptible to having our own behaviour affected by the text-worlds we create. The emotional and physical responses our text-world experiences can induce, may reduce us to tears, provoke laughter, even start revolutions.
We can populate … We are able … our text-word experiences: Text World Theory provides a framework for analysing how we as active participants in discourse create and construct meaning, using the entirety of our experience as embodied beings interacting with our environment.
Regardless of the type of language being examined, exploring linguistic capability from a cognitive perspective necessarily involves a commitment to understanding how language, just like any other aspect of our day-to-day existence, is processed by human beings in all its psychological complexity. Most importantly, this means recognising the crucial role played by the contextual factors which surround every act of communication. The mental representations through which we understand one another are based not just on the language we use, but on our wider surroundings, our personal knowledge and our previous experiences. They are both as individual as we are and as socially and historically interconnected as we are. These cognitive and experientialist assumptions are the primary foundations upon which Text World Theory is built.
There’s a post forthcoming on my preliminary effort at applying Text World Theory to the two competing versions of the Lemnian Deed (a belated follow-up to last year’s experiment with exposition) but I encourage anyone interested in the potential application of Text World Theory to their own reading and/or research to visit the site.
Of course, an exhaustive trial of Text World Theory and all its mechanisms is impossible within these pages and, for this reason, the reader of this book is invited to participate actively in the ongoing text-world project and undertake new and original analyses of his or her own. I cannot emphasise enough that the development of the text-world approach is still in progress and that all interested academics and students have the opportunity to share in the ownership of the insights into language and the human mind it can offer.
On the site, there’s a section for teachers on teaching Text World Theory in the classroom including resources, workshops, and lesson plans. And, for interested readers in the Sheffield area, there’s a great opportunity to participate in a Text-Worlds Reading Group. Click, click!