Let's talk about how to wreck a nice beach. Well, actually, if I were presenting this chapter verbally, you would have little difficulty understanding the preceding sentence as Let's talk about how to recognize speech . The point is that we understand speech in context.
Spoken language is filled with ambiguities.
Perhaps the most basic ambiguity in spoken language is the phenomenon of homonyms , words that sound absolutely identical but are actually different words with different meanings. Context is the only source of knowledge that can resolve such ambiguities. HAL understands that the word their is an adjective and would have to be followed by the noun it modifies. Because it is the last word in the sentence, there is the only reasonable interpretation. A more difficult task in interpreting Frank's statement is the word all.