ABSTRACT
THE chapter by Badzinski and Gill is a useful and thorough cataloguing of numerous issues and variables that influence the process of com- prehension. The breadth and inclusiveness of the essay are a real strength. Moreover, the authors appreciate the complexity of the problem and that future work must be based on sound theory. At stake is our understanding of the relationship between language and comprehension, a relationship that is inherently indeterminate and schematic. What follows below is not so much a critique of Badzinski and Gilľs chapter as it is an extension of the issues. Although their chapter nicely specifies variables that influence the psycho-linguistic process we call “comprehension,” I found their discussion too reliant on the “objective” features of text and cognition and not reliant enough on the “subjective” experience of interactants. By subjective experience, I do not mean the one-time idiosyncratic meanings of individuals but the proc- esses by which language users (communicators) assign conventional mean- ings to utterances—pragmatic comprehension (Ellis, 1992a, pp. 202–205).
