In decoding a text, one chooses the interpretation involving maximal redundancy, selecting meanings that are most likely and least surprising in the relevant context. Clues for this selection of meanings are gathered from phonetic, phonemic, morphological, syntactic, lexical, and stylistic levels. In disambiguating third-person-pronoun references in reported speech (e.g., "John said to Peter that he had to go to town"), one is often compelled to fall back on examining the reporting verbs for the conditions under which they can be felicitously used and matching them with one's knowledge of the pragmatic relations reported in the text. This illustrates that there is a limit to how far pragmatic meaning can be captured through formal syntactic rules alone before it becomes necessary to move to another strategy of interpretation. (MSE)