GENERATING A CONTEXT IN THE MIND -

 GENERATING A CONTEXT IN THE MIND - 

Whenever we are presented with a sentence, we tend to automatically imagine/construct a background scenario / context for it.

If I tell you that 'John killed the elephant', it would be very easy to imagine that this must have been in some jungle somewhere where John was probably a hunter.

But if I say, slightly modifying the sentence as ‘John planned to kill the elephant’ it's a bit more difficult to imagine the context than before. The (planned + elephant) out of “planned to kill the elephant” makes it difficult. That bracket is the rare part. That is the less heard, encountered, experienced part. (Also, note that here a certain effect is operating. After presenting the first sentence and talking about a possible context it is easy to modify it and imagine the context in this next case. If this sentence was presented fresh, at first, things would have been different!)

It is the rare parts which make the conceptualization/imagination of a contextual scenario difficult. We will come to this later.

We begin thinking from the rare / conspicuous parts. We don't start from ‘killing’ (which is the common part), we start from ‘elephant’, (which is a bit rare an element by itself since we don't encounter elephants commonly in some form/medium in life, and is also more "concrete" an entity than the abstract 'planned'), which leads to the 'jungle'. Then there is also the part ‘planned’ which has to be fitted in and hence (planned + jungle) is a bit hard. 

But it's not just the individual words whose rarity or commonness decide things

. 

Suppose I say, ‘We killed the polar bear’.

Here the combination (we + polar bear) in the sentence ‘we killed the polar bear’ is the rare part. Killing is fine (common). But who could this ‘we’ be? And of course, more importantly, a polar bear?

Some different combinations of words from among those in the presented sentence happen / juggle in the mind, till the mind settles/fixates at the rarest combination, to start generating the imaginary context from.