Pragmatics
The Role of Co-Text
Think about the referents in the newspaper headlines above. The same name, Germany, refers to different sets of entities in each of the headlines. Which are they?
Being a competent member of a particular community, a reader of the newspaper headlines above will be able to make the right inferences in order to understand that 'Germany' in the first headline refers to a soccer team, in the second headline it refers to the police, and in the third headline the referent is a group of chairpersons and politicians.