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Coherence
Generally, what language users have most in mind is an assump-tion of coherence, that what
is said or written will make sense in terms of their normal experience of things. That 'normal'
experi-ence will be locally interpreted by each individual and hence will be tied to the familiar
and the expected. In the neighborhood where I live, the notice in [1a. ] means that someone is
selling plants, but the notice in [1b. ] does not mean that someone is sell-ing garages.

[І] a. Plant Sale
b. Garage Sale
Although these notices have an identical structure, they are inter-preted differently.
Indeed, the interpretation of [1b. ], that some-one is selling household items from their garage,
is one that requires some familiarity with suburban life.
This emphasis on familiarity and knowledge as the basis of coherence is necessary
because of evidence that we tend to make instant interpretations of familiar material and tend
not to see possible alternatives. For example, the question presented in [2. ] is easily answered
by many people.

[2] How many animals of each type did Moses take on the Ark?
If you immediately thought of 'two', then you accessed some
common cultural knowledge, perhaps even without noticing that
the name used ('Moses') was inappropriate. We actually create a
coherent interpretation for a text that potentially does not have it.
We are also unlikely to stop and puzzle over 'a male and a female (what?)' as we read about
the accident reported in [3].

[3] A motor vehicle accident was reported in front of Kennedy Theatre involving a male
and a female.
We automatically 'fill in' details (for example, a male person driving one of the motor vehicles)
to create coherence. We also construct familiar scenarios in order to make sense of what might
first appear to be odd events, as in the newspaper headline in [4].

[4] Man Robs Hotel with Sandwich
If you created an interpretation for [4] that had the sandwich (perhaps in a bag) being used
as if it was a gun, then you activated
the kind of background knowledge expected by the writer (as confirmed by the rest of the
newspaper article). You may, of course, have created a quite different kind of interpretation (for
example, the man was eating the sandwich while robbing the hotel). Whatever it was, it was
inevitably based on what you hadin mind and not only on what was in the 'text' in [4].
Background knowledge
Our ability to arrive automatically at interpretations of the unwritten and the unsaid must
be based on pre-existing know-ledge structures. These structures function like familiar patterns
from previous experience that we use to interpret new experiences. The most general term for
a pattern of this type is a schema (plural, schemata). A schema is a preexisting knowledge
struc-ture in memory.
If there is a fixed, static pattern to the schema, it is sometimes called a frame. A frame
shared by everyone within a social group would be something like a prototypical version. For
example, within a frame for an apartment, there will be assumed compon-ents such as kitchen,