ABSTRACT
Knowledge of the world and the knowledge emanating from situational and contextual cues are referred to below as factual knowledge. The problem to be dealt with here is how factual knowledge is employed in interpreting an utterance; in which form it is stored and by means of which rules it is employed in making inferences about the speaker's intentions. However, while some factual knowledge can be formalized by grammatical rules, more specifically, by selection restrictions, there is factual knowledge which is in principle not formalizable within a grammar. The comprehension of sentences could be assumed to proceed along lines laid down by the grammar, with the consequence that anomalous sentence which violate selection restrictions were predicted to be more difficult to handle. These changes in linguistic theory made it appear that comprehension of utterances might ultimately be explained entirely on the basis of the hearer's internalized knowledge of grammar.
