ABSTRACT
How does your reading proceed? Clearly you try to comprehend, in the sense of identifying meanings for individual words and working out relationships between them, drawing on your implicit knowledge of English grammar (see Unit 3, Analysing units of structure). If you are unfamiliar with words or idioms, you guess at their meaning, using clues presented in the context (as possibly with ‘the right hand of friendship’). On the assumption that they will become relevant later, you make a mental note of discourse entities such as ‘my relatives in England’ and ‘John Herncastle’, as well as possible links between them. You begin to infer a context for the text, for instance by making decisions about what kind of speech event is involved: who is making the utterance, to whom, when and where? (In this case, an unnamed writer in India is addressing relatives in England – relatives who are therefore presumably also related to
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to build up, even though you are obliged to leave gaps: who is the writer who remains for the time being just ‘I’? Who are the relatives? What has gone on before?
