These sentences are similar in form but curiously different in meaning.

Any competent speaker

of English will understand sentence (1) to mean that Homer expected to do the surprising and
that he expected to surprise someone other than himself. Sentence (2) contains the identical
substring of words Homer expected to surprise him, but it is immediately understood to have a
very different meaning.
In fact, it has at least two meanings distinct from that of sentence (1): someone other than Homer
(“who”) is expected to be the surpriser, and the surprisee (“him”) may be either Homer or some
third party. Finally, sentence (3) is identical to sentence (2) minus the word him, but now Homer
again must be the surpriser, rather than the surprisee.
These facts are remarkably intricate and subtle, yet immediately obvious to anyone who has
mastered English. But what principles are we following in making these judgments? In fact, we
don’t have a clue—not initially, at least. True, we can make complex judgments about sentences
like these. But we cannot directly grasp the basis of our judgments. People don’t consciously
know why, when they say I wonder who Homer expected to surprise him, the name Homer and
the pronoun him will be taken to refer to different people. The knowledge that we possess of our
language is almost entirely unconscious or tacit knowledge. In this respect, language appears to
be similar to other important parts of the mental life. Sigmund Freud is famous for having
proposed that much of the mind’s functioning and contents lies entirely hidden to consciousness.
Freud held that unconscious phenomena and processes are no less psychologically real than
conscious ones, and that appeal to them is just as necessary for an understanding of human
cognition.