by

Peter H. Fries

Central Michigan University

It is well-known that sentences which are taken out of context change meaning. Texts create patterns of meaning which affect how the component sentences are interpreted in context. A careful study of a two-paragraph text which contains a high concentration of matching relations shows one technique by which texts influence the interpretations of their component sentences. The study shows that the comparison of messages is an important aspect of the interpretation of a text and that it relates to certain dynamic aspects of the text, such as the use of denials, partial denials, and the probable placement of sentence accent. The technique of analysis proposed here may be extended to examine matching between large portions of a text (as in episodes of a story) and matching between texts.