ABSTRACT
Semantic matching construes the former kind of relations. Semantic matching is a process which has no parallel in the production of utterances. Production employs only rules based on knowledge of the language, and this parallels the structuring process in comprehension. Semantic matching and structuring are two ways of arriving at the relations underlying an utterance. An important characteristic common to matchings and structurings is that they are probabilistic. It will be remembered that most structural cues are ambiguous. The same is true for the cues leading to semantic matching. The probability value of a matching, like that of a structuring, is subject to change in the course of the comprehension process. The knowledge captured by selection restrictions may lead to high-probability negative semantic matchings, whereas other factual knowledge may lead to either negative or positive matchings with low to high probabilities.
