KEY ISSUES IN THIS CHAPTER

In Chapter 2 we saw how the participants in a discourse-world are wilfully engaged in an act of communication which is greatly dependent on various kinds of knowledge. We saw how different aspects of discourse require us to access different areas of our perceptual, linguistic, experiential and cultural knowledge in a process which is essentially text-driven. Our existing knowledge frames enable us to conceptualise and understand discourse and we use them as the basis for the mental representations we create of the language we encounter. This chapter examines how the process of constructing these mental representations, or text-worlds, is facilitated. It begins the exploration of the precise conceptual structure of the worlds we create in our minds, which will form the focus of the coming chapters of this book. Of central interest in this chapter is the relationship between our conceptualisation of real-world experiences and our mental representation of discourse. In particular, this chapter investigates how our understanding of physical space and the progress of time in our everyday lives has a direct influence on how we create text-worlds from discourse. The processes by which we begin to conceptualise the spatial and temporal setting of a text-world are examined in relation to an internet audio-guide and some extracts from literary prose fiction.