Explanation
A text world is the mentally constructed and culturally framed model that readers build from a text's characters, objects, spaces, times, rules, and possible events. It is identical neither with the printed sentences nor with an actual world. Explicit statements, inferences, and activated knowledge combine into a navigable coherence that is continually extended or revised during reading. Unreliability, fiction, and impossible worlds can therefore be studied without treating their propositions as facts. The conceptual movement runs from scattered linguistic cues towards a modelled whole and, when contradictions arise, back to reconstruction. Text worlds thus show that understanding is not merely the decoding of separate meanings but the controlled construction of a horizon of possible relations.
Movement of thought
1. The text provides separate cues concerning persons, objects, places, times, and the rules governing possible events. 2. Readers combine these cues with inference and relevant world knowledge to form a provisional model. 3. New sentences extend, focus, or correct the projected world and retrospectively alter earlier expectations. 4. A counter-test separates what is explicitly stated, plausibly inferred, and merely imported from personal experience. 5. The text world becomes visible as a dynamic space of understanding constrained by text but realised in reception.
Scientific use case
Cognitive poetics, narratology, and discourse analysis study how texts build world models, shift perspectives, and distribute knowledge. Experiments can measure when spatial or causal inconsistencies disrupt processing.
Example
Three sentences mention a closed bridge, a silenced carillon, and people returning home before sunset; a city with rules, history, and impending danger begins to take shape.
Counterexample
A list of mentioned objects does not yet constitute a text world, and private imagination cannot count without limit as textual evidence. Linguistic cues and licensed inferences must sustain the model.
Distinction
Distinguish the text world from the discourse world, which more strongly includes communicative situation, participants, and knowledge frames, and from a frame as schematic knowledge structure. Intertextuality connects text worlds but is not their construction itself.
Effect on thought and perception
Text worlds create orientation and immersion, yet may organise knowledge as deliberately incomplete or contradictory. They guide what appears possible, near, or consequential.
Resonance
A space stretches between scattered signs, although no one has fully stated it. Each new piece of information changes its paths and makes earlier passages answer differently.
Etymology
Technical core term; individual etymological review pending
Provenance
ATLAS 241 residual-case triage → profile candidate 241-C → source and neighbourhood cross-check → ATLAS 244
Cite this entry
Reich, Michael (Hrsg./ed.): „Text world“. Atlas der Sprache, AT-CORE-244-022. ATLAS 260, data model 1.6.0. https://atlasoflanguage.com/concept/AT-CORE-244-022The address remains stable; editorial content may evolve. Editorial reading state: 2026-10-15. Include your access date for precise references.
Historical background
Chapter 7 of Werth’s posthumous 1999 Text Worlds defines text worlds as bounded conceptual scenarios and deictic spaces. World-building elements are distinguished from propositions advancing the discourse. Understanding is thus examined as construction of a structured representation, not unlimited imagination. The editor reports a missing final manuscript and reconstruction of some portions. That transmission limit remains part of the evidence; German reception is not invented from the English book.
How conceptual history changes the analysis
A text world is not an object list. Its spatial, temporal and referential relations require textual evidence.
References for the historical section
- B-WERTH-1999 · Text Worlds, colophonPDF5; editor’s prefacePDF9; ch.7§§7.1–7.2 pp.180,182 / PDF199,201; upside-down OCRpage200 not used