A miscommunication may be said to take place when there is a mismatch between the speaker's intention and the hearer's interpretation. When two persons do communicate successfully. it is clear that much more is involved than the mapping of internal structures (or linguistic rules) on to external sequences. or conversely (from the listener's point of view). mapping external sequences on to internal structures (Bever. 1970. p. 286). A number of perceptual strategies or .. short-cuts .. appear to be implemented by a listener in decoding utterances. and it is probably most sensible to adopt for the moment Aitchison's notion of a person's grammar as a ''linguistic archive··. available and ready for consultation in interpreting utterances. but not necessarily consulted. Thus. a sentence like the following is difficult to comprehend. although it is perfectly grammatical: