Interpreting real and fictional worlds in interaction: A socio-cognitive approach to reading group talk

This paper analyses how representations of real life and fictional worlds are combined and differentiated in the talk produced in literary reading groups. We adopt a socio-cognitive approach to reading group interaction, which combines discourse analysis and Text World Theory to examine the social and cognitive processes enacted in examples of such talk. Text World Theory is a cognitive linguistic discourse analysis framework which examines the mental spaces (“worlds”) cued by language-in-use and the ontological relations between those worlds. This combined framework is applied to four extracts of reading group talk and facilitates the discussion of the structural, referential and representational aspects of the interaction. Our analysis considers the insights which reading group talk provides into the complex relationships between text and talk. We argue that ontological shifting in reading group talk performs various functions, such as claiming expertise, doing humour and play, and mitigating face-threatening disagreement. Talking about texts allows people these options for shifting between representations of real life and fictional worlds and this may go some way towards accounting for the popularity of such groups in contemporary culture.