ABSTRACT
The poem given to the largest number of informants was W. H. Auden's 'Gare du Midi', and we shall therefore report on readings of this poem only. The vogue of Rezeptionsasthetik, reader-response criticism, and other movements emphasizing the role of the reader in literary communication, empirical, data-based studies of literary text comprehension have been relatively rare. They are more properly a matter of individual response and criticism, and perhaps of explications of how a critic was affected by his background and prejudices, than of empirical mass registration and statistical treatment. Intelligibility thus involves recognition of phonological or orthographic and syntactic patterns. Discourse interpretation, then, involves both a referential and a symptomatic element, a message and a metamessage; and these are understood through an interplay of syntax, semantic knowledge, and pragmatic knowledge referring both to the world-at-large and to the specific communicative situation.
