Speech is joint generation of sense.

In this process, interlocutors construct a universe of discourse.

The universe of discourse is an intensional world created and developed by interlocutors in a speech situation.

• Its psychological counterpart is the intersection set of their consciousness.
• It is dynamic: it develops and changes with the progress of the discourse/conversation.
• It comprises the referents of the discourse with all the information accrued during it.
• It is manipulated by speech acts
  • which introduce new referents
  • add information to these referents
  • create and cancel virtual worlds with their referents.
  It fades away by oblivion.
• It is the locus of the sense of linguistic expressions, i.e. of what interlocutors mean by their utterances.
• It has the same relation to “reality” as any other idea.
• It disappears with the speech situation (but may be revitalized at the next encounter of the interlocutors).