Text World Theory: An Introduction

by Joanna Gavins

Text World Theory is a cognitive model of all human discourse processing. In this introductory textbook, Joanna Gavins sets out a usable framework for understanding mental representations. Text World Theory is explained using naturally occurring texts and real situations, including literary works, advertising discourse, the language of lonely hearts, horoscopes, route directions, cookery books and song lyrics. The book will therefore enable students, teachers and researchers to make practical use of the text-world framework in a wide range of linguistic and literary contexts.Features*An accessible and enabling course book which includes suggestions for exploration and further reading.*Draws on linguistics, cognitive science, psychology, philosophy, poetics and stylistics, and will be attractive to students and researchers working in all of these disciplines.*Each chapter provides a reader-friendly introduction to an aspect of Text World Theory and includes at least two practical applications of these ideas to real discourse examples.

Genres: Literary Criticism

Paperback

First published May 15, 2007

Reviews

[Mona · Rating 4 out of 5]

Sometimes I needed to read werth's book because this book don't explain the basics.

[Mikk · Rating 5 out of 5]

An excellent guide to the framework of text world theory, a method of discourse analysis which has grown out of the developments in the cognitive sciences, mainly anthropology and linguistics. The concepts are presented and explained is a clear and precise fashion, the examples are precise and don't overstay their welcome (unlike many parts of an other book in the same field, The Way We Think Now by Fauconnier and Turner) and the book navigates its field well, which is remarkable, in my opinion, because it is so new and, in a sense, incoherent. "More work is needed" is a phrase often heard and rarely far from thought in these matters.

I'd also like to add that the book has a clear practical bent, as the text never gets dense or challening and mainly demonstrates the applications of the text world framework. Each chapter has further questions and challenges for the reader to kick-start further thought. Most of the cognitive processes of reading that are analysed are normally rather unconscious and merely drawing one's attention to them in itself won't convince most people that there is something relevant to see there. To actually bring the habits of reading, the assumptions and the knee-jerk choices, to light seom work is needed. So I definitely recommend applying the described framework. On any text, really! The book uses lonely hearts ads. appliance manuals and political speeches as examples (in addition to literature, of course).

[Steve Justice · Rating 5 out of 5]

Text World Theory is (in my opinion) at the cutting edge of cognitive linguistic studies. Due to its holistic approach to the study of discourse, Text World Theory is both expansive and complicated. Joanna Gavins' introduction does a great job of explaining the material in a clear manner without losing depth or detail.