Text-World Theory

06 Feb, 2026

0.

I've mentioned this before: I'm not a programmer.
My background is in literature and linguistics; mostly Cognitive Linguistics: the study of language as a cognitive phenomenon.

1.

There's a particular framework I find fascinating: Text-World Theory.

The premise is that humans process discourse (i.e., text & context) by creating rich mental models in their minds. These mental representations are termed text-words because they are structurally similar to spatial mental models.

Texts contain the stimuli that elicit text-worlds in the receiver's mind. In TWT, these can be world-builders (objects, enactors, and location/time markers); and function-advancing propositions (descriptions and events).

2.

Fiction is weird.

West of house

You are standing in an open field west of a white house, with a boarded front door.
There is a small mailbox here.

The above is just a text. Whatever you see in your mind, that's a text-world. How many storeys does the house have? Mine (the one I see) has two. Yours might, or might not. Yet we can both envision the same scene, play the same game.

I find three things compelling about this:

1. we will inevitably fill in the blanks when we conceptualise a situation;
2. building somewhat different mental representations does not impede shared experiences;
3. when it comes to world-building, a little goes a long way.

3.

This is an essential text-world diagram template:

And that's the origin of my ROOM structure.

• A room is a string of text.
• A room is a recipe.
• A room contains the ingredients to build a text-world.

Reach out

#else #eng