Context models and the pragmatics of discourse

The contributions of Walter Kintsch that are especially relevant for the field of discourse studies are his studies on mental models, knowledge, and strategic discourse processing. Based on his earlier work regarding mental models and how they account for the cognitive semantics of discourse, this paper advocates for the extension of this theory to the pragmatics of discourse in the form of context models, featuring the parameters of the communicative situation: time, place, participants (identities, roles, relations), action, goals, knowledge, and their expression in deictic or indexical structures of text or talk.