relevant information in the construction of a Text Representation in Episodic Memory.
Models
Kintsch and I introduced another crucial notion, viz., that of a (situation) model, a notion that was also used, though in a different way, by the psycholinguist Johnson-Laird in his books Mental Models (1983). The point of that notion is that language users do not merely construct a (semantic) representation of the text in their episodic memory, but also a representation of the event or situation the text is about. This notion of model proved to be very successful. It explained many things that hitherto were obscure or ignored: First of all, it beautifully ‘grounded’ the theory of referential coherence: Sentences (or their propositions) were simply defined to be coherent relative to a model. That is, if people are able to construe a possible or plausible model for a sequence or a whole text, then the text is subjectively coherent. This also resolves the problem of ‘extralinguistic’ reference in linguistics and discourse analysis: It is not so much the ‘real world’ people are referring to or talking about, but the (inter)subjective (re)construction of the world, or a situation in the world, in terms of their mental models. That is, we thus have a cognitive and subjective, and hence more realistic, basis for the notion of ‘referential coherence’ that was earlier defined more abstractly in terms of formal models or possible worlds. 9