The Cognitive representation of the situation in directive communication

ENFollowing the connectionist tenet that mental states are determined by context- sensitive associations between specific tokens and by the network’s particular activation dynamics [Rumelhart & McClelland 1986], it was hypothesized that implicitly activated associations may become part of the cognitive models of the interlocutors in directive verbal communication. In the empirical part of the investigation a specific question was asked whether association fields of directives reveal associative context. The association fields of three sub-types of directives were analyzed. It was found that the association field of the word denoting a directive reveals the situational associative context.