ABSTRACT
The idea of global processing of information is not new in psychology. Both in the Gestalt tradition and in more recent work on cognition and artificial intelligence, notions have been used that are similar to or linked with our concept of macrostructure. It has been an important difference between recent cognitive models of semantic interpretation and those in linguistics that ‘real’ comprehension does not follow the respective units and levels of ’abstract’ semantic theory. The organization of propositional information in Facts is crucial from a cognitive point of view. Sentences may express up to around 20 atomic propositions, as in the first sentence of the crime story. The cognitive application of the Deletion rule is more complex. Whereas for Generalization the language user only has to generate the appropriate superconcept of a sentence and whereas in Construction the appropriate script must be found, Deletion requires that reader makes a complex ‘calculation’ about possible relevance of the proposition.
