communication failures

A series of communication failures to report.

Last night, I failed to communicate with the world of dreams as I only had 3 hours of sleep. Potential reasons: I'm in love (I wish), I am working (partly), I worry too much (most likely)

Today, I had a problem accessing the corpus. Potential reasons: technical network problems (hopefully treatable), UCL sold Middlesex a flawed copy (academic prank?), I was never meant to use this particular corpus (hmmm..)

Washing my hands in the loo (aka restroom/ladies room in most parts of the world), I heard the following case of reference assignment failure:

(two girls talking while in separate toilet cabins)
A: B.. do you have a break?
B: yeh
A: (short pause) how long is it?
B: what is?
A: the break, how long is it?
B: uh.. 5 minutes

Potential reasons: B just didn't hear A properly (likely), a more complicated linguistic reason that has to do with the pragmatic effect of the pause and its relation to the cognitive status semantically encoded by it (tell you all about it in two and half years), B has more important things to attend to ( :} )

Mai