By its nature, literature is a form of alternate construal. It deals with imaginative alternatives to the status quo, projecting narrative accounts which in one way or another engage the real and the imagined. Among the many types of alternate construals offered by literature is a refiguring of history also known as the genre(s) of alternate history, alternate universes, allohistories or uchronias.

The notion of construal, understood of a relationship between language users and the conceptualizations they entertain for purposes of linguistic expression, has become one of the hallmarks of cognitive linguistics. Characterized in this way, construal appears to be ubiquitous in linguistic categorization, inasmuch as any act thereof involves interpretation of a continuous flux of stimuli on the part of a language user.  

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