ABSTRACT
“The price that has to be paid for promiscuity is not very high.” This sounds like a quote from Madonna that is basically wrong—the price to be paid for promiscuity these days can be quite high with AIDS as a possible consequence. But in fact, this is a quote from Kintsch (1988, p. 180) regarding his Construction-Integration model. The Construction-Integration model posits that as the words of a text are formed into concepts and propositions, they each activate a set of neighboring associations. It is a context-free process of activation; so, material that is irrelevant, and perhaps inconsistent with the meaning of a text, can be activated. In short, the result is a network of promiscuous associations. This is what Kintsch was referring to when he used the term promiscuity. When he said, “the price to be paid for promiscuity is not very high,” he was referring to the fact that the integration process that needs to work on this promiscuous network to rid it of inconsistencies and irrelevancies is a small price to pay for the flexibility and power of such a system.
