This paper discusses one way of exploring how we perceive and understand the connections between some parts of texts, or between one sentence and the whole discourse. Understanding ellipsis involves non-syntactic understanding; the semantic structure is responsible for our understanding of elliptical sentences and encoding the knowledge contained in them. These covert pieces of information are referred to as "structures of expectation." The structures of expectation responsible for our comprehension of connected discourse can be demonstrated by showing how explicit arguments satisfying our expectations are supplied by information given later in the text. The approach was tested in an experiment in which several groups of people were given three sets of sentences with the structure: "A did X. B did Y." Subjects were asked to explain the situation in each set by drawing inferences about the relation between the two parts of each set. One clue to ways of relating the pairs of sentences is stress; another is argument-sharing. This type of analysis can teach us something about the structures underlying our inferences from the manifest content of texts. (Author/AM)