English Language Teaching in its Social Context

COMPREHENSION AND PRODUCTION STRATEGIES 771 Whenever you find a determiner (a, an, the) or quantifier (some, all, many, two, six,etc.) begin a new noun phrase.2 Whenever you find a co-ordinating conjunction (and, or, but, nor) begin a newconstituent similar to the one you just completed.3 Try to attach each new word to the constituent that came just before.(hid.: 66)They illustrate this last strategy through an advertising campaign run by a Londonevening paper with posters such as ‘Zoo keeper finds Jaguar queuing for underground ticket’,and ‘Butler finds new station between Piccadilly and Oxford Strcct’.The paper wanted morepeople to realize how useful its small advertisements section was and to attract their attentionto posters they would normally glance at only briefly while passing. So they exploited the‘doublc-take’ that readers were led into by using the third of the above micro-strategies.Readers then had to recognize the improbability of their first interpretation of ‘queuing’being attached to ‘Jaguar’ and ‘new station’ to ‘between Piccadilly and Oxford Street’, andmove the link to the first noun in each sentence.Clark arid Clark (~bzd.: 72-79) also discuss semantic strategies, such as:4 Using content words alone, build propositions that make sense and parse the sentenceinto constituents accordingly.Fillenbaum (1 97 1 ) illustrates the operation of this strategy by showing that when peoplewere asked to paraphrase ‘perverse’ sentences like ‘John dressed and had a bath’, theynormalized them, with more than half of his subjects even asserting there was ‘not a shredof difference’ between the paraphrase and the original.Clark and Clark are, in effect, arguing that native-speaker comprehension is probabilisticin nature, and does not follow any sort of deterministic model which would rely on anexhaustive parsing of the utterance concerned. Instead, listeners use a variety of means tomaximize the chances that they will be able to recover the intended meaning of what is beingsaid to them.They are not, in other words, using some linguistic model to retrieve meaningcomprehensively and unambiguously. Instead, they cope with the problem of‘ having toprocess language in real time by employing a variety of strategies which will probablycombine to be effective, even though there is no guarantee that this will be the case.Presumably if a comprehension difficulty arises during ongoing processing, the listener canshift to a different mode of mcaning extraction, as perhaps in the case of the 700 keeper andthe Jaguar (as was intended by the authors of the poster). But this is not done routinely: theprimary strategy is to achieve effectiveness in very fast language processing. Most listeners,in their native language, prefer to make a bcst-guess and keep up, rather than be accused ofbeing slow-witted but accurate pedants (although we can all bring to mind some membersof this species).These ‘micro’ issues discussed by Clark and Clark (1 977) can be located within a widermodel of comprehension, which has a more macro perspective.The following table is adaptedfrom Anderson and Lynch (I 988: 1 3), who suggest that comprehension (again, for themoment, native-speaker comprehension) is dependent on three main sources of knowledge:Schematic knowledgebackground knowledge- factual- sociocultural