PREVIEW

This chapter looks at how connections are made between elements within and across sentences. It focuses largely on comprehension, but includes also some discussion of how speakers mark these connections. By the end of the chapter you should understand, amongst other things, that:

• speakers use devices for showing the links between related information and that listeners follow strategies in their interpretation of such links;

• understanding discourse frequently involves the listener in making inferences based on what has been heard;

• listeners are sensitive to how speakers mark information as being new to the conversation rather than information repeated from earlier in the conversation.

Introduction

The links between sentences or between turns in a conversation are critical to our understanding of utterances (Clark, 1996). We have seen in previous chapters how the context provided by a sentence or paragraph can influence the interpretation of an ambiguous sentence. In the current chapter we consider different kinds of relationship within and between sentences. These include the relationship between pronouns or other devices and the previously mentioned items to which they refer. They also include informational structure, with speakers indicating that some elements in the discourse are already known to the speaker and listener and that some elements are new information. We also consider how it is that readers and listeners can work out with great efficiency what the links are between elements in these and other kinds of structure.