Literal language refers to text in which no metaphors or other tropes appear and all words are used according to a single definitional authority, such as an analyst or a text producer. Explicit language contains no implicit premises or referents that require inferences drawing on background knowledge. Because the referential connections between sentences are explicit, the coherence of the text becomes manifest. Immediate reference accounts for the most basic model, single-sense, literal and explicit processing. Constraint-directed graph matching finds the correspondences from sentences to semantic memory.
Word senses cause no confusion because only one sense appears for each part of speech.
The absence of tropes and implicit referents defers some of the difficult problems of reference. The move to multiple word senses begins by using lexical classification to recognize and label different senses. It continues by using meaning congruences to recognize dynamically equivalent paraphrases for references across sentences. The reference system has the ability to recognize nominalizations of verbs. The lexical classifier uses selection constraints to identify different senses of words.