Studies on Text World Theory: A Review

Text world theory, which is developed on the basis of cognitive linguistics and cognitive psychology, has attracted extensive attention in the fields of linguistics, literature and so on. This study makes a systematic review of the theoretical and empirical studies on text world theory, so as to analyse the current development of text world theory, establish the gaps and provides implications for further research. It can be found that materials involved in the application study of text world theory mainly include novels, poems, plays, films, news discourses and oral dialogues. Text world theory is also applied to the fields like writing and language teaching. As the theoretical framework of text world theory has continually been improving and its application scope been broadening, this study proposes the following suggestions for future studies. As for the theoretical study, it needs to further refine and revise its theoretical framework, and integrate other theories to consolidate its theoretical basis; as for the application study, it needs to expand the scope of the research material, solve the problems of unbalanced research objects and lack of empirical studies. Considering its prominent academic significance in discourse analysis and other related fields, more attention should be paid on the study of text world theory.