Connexity, Interpretability, Universes of Discourse, and Text Worlds

Possible Worlds — Text Worlds — Discourse Worlds and the Semiosphere

“…Against some voices that have tried to undermine the utility of possible worlds in the description of natural language, researchers in text semantics, most prominently Doležel, Enkvist and Werth, decided to enrich this concept in such manner as to make it more palatable for the analysts of literary works. Enkvist (1989) [30] introduces two mutually related terms: text world and universe of discourse. Whereas the former is a possible world that supports a particular, prototypically fictional, literary creation, the latter is a semantic model of the world without which the interpretation of the text world would be hindered, if not altogether impossible.…”

“…1 Ingarden (1931/1973 [41], also Wolfgang Iser 1976, as a continuator of the same phenomenological tradition) talked about concretisation/actualisation as a necessary reader-response tactics, that is gap-filling. Enkvist (1989) [30, pp. 166-167] points to inferencing capacities of text interpreters.…”

“…Yet, in the huge majority of cases, semiotically understood discourse worlds, as the richest methodological construct revolving around the central notion of world, should help the interpreter in what Enkvist (1989) [30, pp. 165-166] has aptly called an "incremental text comprehension."…”

“…These are: 1) possible worlds of the logically oriented possible-worlds semantics, developed in the 1960s and 1970s by the American school of logicians, analytical philosophers and philosophers of language, most prominently by Saul Kripke (1963Kripke ( /1971Kripke ( , 1972 [45,46], Jaakko [38,39], David [48,49], and Nicholas Rescher (1975) [56]; 2) text worlds (called also, in a limiting way, fictional worlds) of literary semantics and theory of literature (cf. represented worlds in the phenomenological theory of the literary work of art by Roman Ingarden 1931), described from the linguistic and semiotic perspective by, among others, Lubomír [27], Nils Erik Enkvist (1989) [30], Umberto [29], Robert-Alain de Beaugrande and Wolfgang U. Dressler (1990) [3], as well as Paul [66] in the cognitive framework; and finally, 3) discourse worlds postulated by [66], expanded by Peter [63] and Joanna [34] within the model of cognitive poetics called Text-World Theory, and described as the most mature narratological and literary application of possibleworlds theory.…”

“…Since the analysis below will make recourse to two key notions, that of text and discourse, for the sake of our exposition I will roughly follow Enkvist (1989) [30] and assume that a text is a structural, purely linguistic concept (with a realization in either the written or the spoken medium), whereas a discourse is a text enriched with a specific context. In this sense, discourse emerges as a mixed semantico-pragmatic notion, which apart from the core structure (text) possesses additionally a strong functional facet (context).…”