Language models influence our construction and understanding of communication

Models represent the individual ways people make sense of their environment, and how they interpret events and discourse. Also, models represent what we usually call our experiences. Thus, each event, when understood and represented by an individual, will be represented as such a model. The same is true for discourse comprehension in that understanding a text not only involves the construction of a textual representation in memory, but also the construction of a mental or episodic model. Thus, during discourse production, people activate or form a new model and use this as a basis for their text or talk.

In discourse, thus, a model is a subjective representation of what the text is all about. This also offers a useful counterpart of the notion of reference and referent, and a solid basis for the subjective definition of coherence: a text is meaningful and coherent if it has a mental model. In other words, it is not the world or the events themselves that make discourse meaningful, coherent or true or false, but the model people construct of such events, all meaning and interpretation is, therefore, relative to our models.

Models not only represent true or false beliefs, but also opinions. Thus, whereas groups represent their opinions in shared mental representations, individuals represent their personal evaluative beliefs in their models.

The schematic form of models consists of a number of categories. These categories are the setting which consists of time, location and circumstances; participants and events or actions. That is, each time we witness or participate in an event or read or hear about it, we apply such a schematic form to it in order to understand it.

Models represent the interface between social representations of groups, on the one hand, and individual experiences, social practices and discourse, on the other hand. Thus, social members may activate and integrate elements of socially shared knowledge and attitudes as specific beliefs in their models.
In fact, these mental processes take place in a social context. That is, models still need to be compared with the knowledge shared and expressed by other social members. We may accept to share our opinions only with a small number of people, and not with everybody, but will generally expect or claim that our knowledge is more generally shared.

Language users not only construct models of events they talk about, but also of the communicative events in which they participate. Such models will be called context models. Such models represent the knowledge and opinions speakers and writers as well as readers have about themselves and each other in about the setting, circumstances various communicative and social roles, as well as, intentions, goals, purposes and other properties of the context. It should be stated here that it is not the context itself that influences our discourse or the interpretation of discourse, but our subjective models of the context.

Thus, whereas event models provide the subjective knowledge we have about events we talk or write about, context models provide all necessary information for the contextually variable or pragmatic information that influences the style, rhetoric and the surface structures of text and talk. In other words, we may find in editorials, for example, that many of the properties of opinion discourse are not merely based on the opinions we have about some fact or issue, but also on the contextual constraints on how to formulate such opinions. Indeed, editorial writers represent and express their identity as journalists as well as their assumptions about the expectations, knowledge and attitudes of the readers. Thus, the theory of context models allows us to describe and explain the relations between these properties of the social context, on the one hand, and discourse meaning and structure on the other hand.

Hassan Al-Momani, a Western Herald opinion columnist, is a graduate student majoring in English and can be reached via e-mail at hassan76us@yahoo.com.

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Posted by HeraldAdmin on Sep 30 2008. Filed under Opinion. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can leave a response or trackback to this entry

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