ABSTRACT
The analysis of lexis, grammar, and their meanings only takes us so far in understanding how texts are composed or interpreted and what effects they might have on the reader. Some early code models of communication proposed that communication proceeds as follows: a writer has meaning in her head, she encodes this completely in her Text and the reader decodes it, resulting in a successful transfer of meaning from writer to reader. While, as we acknowledged in Part one, code is often important and necessary for communication, it is only one factor and is seldom sufficient. Reading is better modelled as 'a psycholinguistic guessing game', in which the Text provides clues for the reader, and in which not only the meaning of the Text but also the intentions of the writer have to be guessed (Sperber and Wilson 1995: 3-15, Mills 1995: 26-43).
