... make a sentence. There are two main levels of looking at the comprehension of sentences. First of all there is the syntactical structure of each sentence. This is known as parsing. Altmann (1997) pointed out however that, "it [the way in which words are combined] is important, and has meaning, only insofar as both the speaker and the hearer (or the writer and the reader) share some common knowledge regarding the significance of one combination or another. This shared knowledge is grammar." The second level of analysis in the comprehension of sentences is known as pragmatics. This is basically looking at the intended meaning of a sentence, which may be quite different to its literal meaning. Examples of this type of sentence would be when using irony or sarcasm. When presented with connected discourse different tactics need to be employed. Graesser, Millis and Zwaan (1997) claim there are huge differences between the ...

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