Language and Knowledge of the World

Abstract: This article addresses language and knowledge of the world within the communicative process, as it is understood that knowledge of the world plays a preponderant role in effective communication between language users. The main objective of this article was to demonstrate the relevance of knowledge of the world in the communicative process, showing that for the construction of a textual meaning or understanding of the text, several processes occur and the mastery of linguistic knowledge is not a sufficient condition for calculating the sense. This study's starting question is the following: does mastery of linguistic knowledge in itself constitute a sufficient and/or exclusive condition for the construction of textual meaning? To answer this question, bibliographical research was adopted as the study methodology, and the type and method of approach were qualitative and inductive respectively, taking into account that the inductive method starts from the examination of particular data, sufficiently verified and inferred the results of the part examined to the entire population (Marconi & Lakatos, 2003). To carry out this study, participant observation and interviews were also chosen as data collection techniques. Thus, this study showed that for effective communication, that is, construction of textual meaning within the communicative process, a large part has to do with knowledge of the world manifested through shared knowledge about sociocultural conventions and/or pragmatic aspects of language, contradicting the perceptions according to which linguistic knowledge, which is limited only to the domain of the grammatical rules of the language and the lexicon, means that the individual would be able to understand the text.