ABSTRACT
As we have indicated many times in this book, the meaning of a text is not ‘contained’ in the text itself. Sense is made by readers or hearers, who link their knowledge and expectations stored in long-and short-term memory to the processing of the language input. Loosely, we can call this backstage knowledge ‘context’. People do the processing on the basis of minimal communicative cooperation, which leads them to apply both inferential procedures and their ability to check for inconsistency, duplicity, and the like.
