Text world theory and text comprehension

I gave this frivolous answer: A cat, a hat and a piece of string. Partly because I liked the jaunty, careless bounce of the phrase, and partly because each item has many potential uses, on its own or separately, which makes my choice more than a sum of its parts.

I'd bring the cat for company. The hat for shelter from the sun. The piece of string has multiple purposes, including to amuse the cat, or to keep the hat on in a high wind. There's also a scenario in which I use the hat and the piece of string to make a simple fish-trap (presumably to feed the cat); or a less appealing one in which I strangle the cat with a piece of string and cook it for lunch, using the hat as a makeshift tureen. (To be fair, I can't imagine myself ever wanting to eat a cat, but who knows what might happen if you were strandedfor long enough on a desert island?) It occurred to me that I could probably think up a hundred similar stories featuring just those three items (20, p. 9-10).

The linguistic devices in bold mark the attributes of the world models (real and fictional) and signal switches between them. The study of the pragmatic characteristics of these linguistic elements proves that the comprehension of the extract and its interpretation potential is multi-faceted and many-layered due to the partial overlap of the world models, which necessitates identifying essential characteristics of the events and situations, characters and the world perception, actions and their temporal and spatial parameters. In terms of text comprehension the main peculiarity of the extract is the overlapping of the fictional world, resulting in its deictic proximity, created by the complex of linguistic representations of interwoven life experiences of the author and the imaginary world models that are the work of her creative imagination.

Knowledge structures represented in language are either of universal or of individual character. People's understanding and processing of information is primarily determined by the general knowledge of the world, though knowledge formats are not always language based. P. Stockwell states that the cognitive framework puts the choice of different level language means engaged in creating the literary text into a new perspective as its focus is on the study of the role of generalized structures and notions that make the conceptual basis of the narrative [13]. Due to the application of the cognitive approach the functional potential of the linguistic devices is revealed to the full.

Scientific analysis of cognition and communication is based on the fundamental assumption that language users employ structures of expectations, often in the form of an abstract or generalized situation that is usually built on definite social, historical, cultural, and institutional information [2; 16; 18]. It is the semantic aspect of narrative comprehension processes that makes the foundation of relevant interpretation, with emphasis on the study of macro-structures, that is to deal with the global level of the narrative. For comprehension to be adequate these factors are to be explored in the perception and interpretation of any verbal message, while the awareness of socio-cultural knowledge ensures adequate understanding of communication due to its inherent peculiarity of being constructed of shared presuppositions about different domains of the world, that are the result of the collective conceptualization by the language community, regardless of the obvious `openness' of interpretation in every new act of reading and comprehension in every new context [16; 18].

According to T. van Dijk, context models organize the way discourse is structured and adapted to the whole communication situation in the same way as more general mental models organize how we adapt our action to the social situation and environment [2]. Societal or situational structures can only affect discourse through the mediation or the interface of the mental representations of language users, contexts are not some kinds of objective condition or direct cause, but rather subjective constructs designed and continuously updated in interaction by participants as members of groups and communities we believe that the concept of context models is instrumental in the study of discourse attributes that cannot be explained by theories that assume that discourse and narrative texts are determined by social situations that correlate with the world model. Thus world models in the text continuum are of sociocultural nature.

As to socio-cultural models, these contain psychological features, they include alongside the physical world two other major components - societal world and individual or personal world, which is subject to constant modification due to the changes in the amount of knowledge of the community or / and an individual [1].

Another extract exemplifies the argument that the notion “world model” reflects a number of characteristics and variables, such as context, connections across social, cognitive and discourse dimensions of the language proper, its functional representation in speech, and the very communication process either among individuals and across social groups. World models are structured by a number of subcomponents, the range of which is predetermined by a variety of factors and parameters, interrelated and interdependent due to their ability to represent diverse experiences, knowledge and information to ensure relevant perception and interpretation of the narrative.

Stories are like Russian dolls: open them up, and in each one you 'll find another story. This particular story was written when I was in the Congo with Mйdecins Sans Frontiures. Why I was there in the first place is a story in itself, but while I was in Brazzaville I met a gang of small boys who had devised an ingenious (and perilous) means of earning a living. They would gather by the river under the veranda of one of the city's few surviving restaurants and, for a coin or a handful of scraps, would entertain the diners by leaping into the rapids at the river's most dangerous points and riding the current downstream. These children - none of them older than ten years old - would risk their lives dozens of times a day, often for nothing more than a chicken bone or a piece of bread. What's more, they seemed to enjoy it (20, p. 11).

The postulate that the structure of socio-cultural knowledge is organized in sequences of prototypical events, characterized by a number of features is related directly to assumption that it is conditioned by the nature of entities it represents [19]. Knowledge formats such as frame, script, schemata contain structures of expectations that are based on previous experiences as they are built on cultural and societal information about different actions, routines and situations that are expected to be perceived in conventional ways. Socio-cultural knowledge is manifested in the narrative with the help of various linguistic means, while processing a literary text the reader makes use of the abstract model of reality, the general conceptual code, a theory of the world, that are transferred upon the narrative and are involved in the complex interpretation process that predetermines the use of the mechanisms, acquired previously in the process of experiencing the real world.

Perceiving information presented in discourse / text language users deal with it in a special way that is predetermined by expectations, beliefs, attitudes, prior knowledge, individual characteristics, emotions and other variables, connected with the knowledge of the context and the background of the communicants. Experiencing diverse situations people cognize the physical world, this way knowledge of its basic particularities are made while abstractions and generalizations are derived eventually to be used in the future to interpret events and situations, verbal messages and psychological states. Socio-cultural knowledge, organized in sequences of prototypical events and characterized by dynamic change due to the nature and ontological status of the entities they represent, provides foundation for the mechanisms of adequate understanding of social and ethnographic peculiarities of human cognition.

In conclusion, as interpretation of events and situations is conceptual, being based on processing encoded information present in the narrative continuum in the form of knowledge structures/ formats, via a number of different societal or individual factors, that include a system of expectations, beliefs, attitudes, prior knowledge, individual characteristics, emotions and other variables, the study of interrelations and dependencies between culture, language and cognition is of vital importance. Its complexity is preconditioned by a large amount of knowledge, which the members of the language community acquire and share, these being stored (imprinted) in the knowledge formats and structures. In addition, to interpret discourse / narrative content adequately in the context of a concrete situation is to be regarded in accordance with conventional rules and procedures.

The socio-cognitive approach to the interpretation of the textual meanings that accumulates findings and results of interdisciplinary research ensures adequate decoding of the information in the narrative as it aims at the study of a broad range of phenomena such as the nature of meaning, the role of language elements, the effect of context and pragmatics on the understanding of the verbally manifested structures. Focus on the abstract model of reality, the general conceptual code, the world model encoded in the literary text facilitates comprehension and interpretation, the process predetermining the use of the mechanisms and algorithms, acquired previously in experiencing the real world. The perspectives of further study of the interpretation potential and dependences of knowledge structures representation in the narrative are related to the new prospects offered by the TWT as a framework that will ensure relevant narrative comprehension within the discoursal-cognitive dimension and will facilitate exploration of rules, connections, correlations, and switches between the fictional world and the real world in a certain situational context of discourse / text comprehension.

Literature