One perspective for literary analysis assumes certain divisions of language, grammar, and "worlds of discourse." The worlds that language can express are the phenomenal, extensional, intensional, and alternate systems. Within these contexts, certain linguistic features universally affect responses to the world created and the language used. One set of text perceptions exists in an environment of alternate worlds, which combine extensional assumptions about the phenomenal world (acceptable truth values) with the intensional conceptualizations of metatheories about either extensional or other intensional worlds (debatable truth values). These alternate worlds are recognized through the "implicit context" created by the expressions "I imagine (myself in) and invite you to conceive a world in which . . .," and "I believe (or prefer) a world in which . . ." Such text perceptions help to create the literature of a culture; but those texts referring to known but not preferred alternate worlds should be considered secondary literary texts, while texts which are both known and preferred should be considered the primary texts of a culture. With the acceptance of these situations, the study of literary language can take two directions: the description and explanation of how linguistic structures refer to alternate worlds; and the description of alternate value systems and their functions as sociolinguistic and psycholinguistic phenomena. (RL)