The second principal area of interest in pragmatics to which we briefly call attention is speakers' and hearers' use of commonsense knowledge to make sense of utterances. We have pointed out that the question asking for directions to `the gallery in the square containing the monument' is syntactically ambiguous. There is nothing intrinsic in the semantics of the sentence, either, to dictate that we interpret it one way rather than the other. Yet clearly, we would only understand it in one way: that the monument is in the square and not in the gallery. We do so by appealing to our commonsense knowledge about the way things normally are in the world. There is no reason, I suppose, why monuments should not be housed in galleries; but it is much more likely that they would be found in squares. The cognitive scientist David Waltz has further suggested that the brain may use visual and spatial knowledge for interpreting sentences. He gives the following examples (Waltz, 1981):
My dog bit the mailman's leg.
My dachshund bit the mailman's ear.
My doberman bit the mailman's ear.
The first sentence is easily understandable without recourse to visual imagery. The third sentence is probably reasonable, because a doberman is a large dog. But the second sentence may seem improbable because the hearer may find it very difficult to visualize a circumstance in which a small dog like a dachshund could possibly reach a mailman's ear.
If you wish to read further about pragmatics, you could look at Pragmatics (1983) by Stephen Levinson, which comprehensively covers the main topics in the field.