Contexts, Discourse Worlds, Text Worlds

The present paper upholds the possibility, or, indeed, necessity to approach context from the perspective of the ‘cognitive properties’ of the participants in a communicative situation. It claims that the generally-accepted viewpoint on analysis should be reversed and the cognitive constructs, or mental models, used by the participants should not be simply added to the context; it is the context which should be seen as part of the cognitive constructs processed by the participants. After all, context exists to humans only because they see it as such. An objective reality may or may not exist outside human perception and contextual information need not be seen as a special case of ‘real-ness’. In a way, and that can be argued to be quite a crucial way, we can only study our human-specific perceptions of the world (and contexts) and not the world (or a context) itself