Tying Senteces To Context
Listeners are especially anxious to make sense of a sentence in the circumstances they are in at the time. From the cooperative principle they assume that the speaker has made his utterarance relevant to the ongoing discourse-for example,that the speaker has used definited noun phrases like the general to refer to entities they know. They can therefore use this strategy:
Strategi 10: Look for definite noun phrases that refer to entities you know and replace the
interpretation of each noun phrase by a reference to that entity directly.
For illustration, imagine that someone had said 61 followed immediately by 62:
61. Claire and kent climbed Mt. Mckinley last summer.
62. she photographed the peak, and he surveyed it.
Listeners, having heard 61, expect the next sentence to be relevant and perhaps refer to Claire, Kent, Mt, McKinley, last summer, the climb itself, or even the speaker. So on hearing 62, they search for noun phrases that refer to these entities and find she, the peak, he, and it. If Claire, Kent, and Mt. McKinley had been assigned the indices, then the listener can replace she, he, the peak, and it by their corresponding indices and buil the propostions:
62'. Photograph (E9,E17) and Survey (E82,E17)
This strategy enables listener to restrict their search to a small number of noun phrases; Claire, Kent, the speaker, and the listener, for example, would almost certainly be referred to by the noun phrases she, he, I, and you. Any restriction like this should make it easier to perceive the individual words (see Chapter5). Moreover, Strategy 10 tie the sentence in with the on going discourse. One place strategy 10 may take on special importance is in with the ongoing discouse. One place strategy 10 may take on special importance is in selecting between alternative interpretations of a singel sentence (Winograd, 1972). Consider:
63. John put the block in the box the shelf.
the could mean ceither the block in the bos was put on the shelf, or that the block was put in the box on the shelf. By strategy 10, listeners can decide which interpretation was intended. If in that situation there is a block in the box and no box on the shelf, the first interpretation must have been intended; if there is no block in the box and the box is on the shelf, the second interpretation must have been intended. As springston (1975) has demonstated, listeners look for noun phrases that refer to recently mentioned entities first. Consider 64 and 65:
64. John said that Bill hit him.
65. John said that Mary hit him.
On reaching him in 64, listeners are open to noun phrases referring to either John or Bill. Since him could refer to either, they must note that him cannot refer to bill for syntactic reasons-him would have to be himself-and then settle on John. On reaching him in 65, on the other hand, listeners are open to references to either John or Mary, and him, because of its gender, can only refer to John. As expected, in Springston's study people managed to pick out the correct referent fir him faster in 65 than in 64, even though it refers to jhon in both sentences. In a series of similar comparisons, Springston demonstrated that listeners are faster at identifying a referent the more recently it has been mentioned and the more ways alternative candidates (like Bill and Mary in 64 and 65) can be eliminated on syntactic, semantic, or progmatic grounds.
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