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 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).