ABSTRACT
Another is that we ought to be concerned with the processes of producing and interpreting texts, and with how these cognitive processes are socially shaped and relative to social conventions, not just with texts themselves. Consider for instance how w interprets the absence of any acknowledgement by the policeman of the information she supplies. If something similar happened in a friendly conversation, it would be experienced by participants as a real absence and a problem, maybe an indication of disbelief or embarrassment, and one would expect to find its problematical character reflected in formal features of the text (such as an 'embarrassed silence' or signs of hesitation). In the police interview, acknowledgement would I think not generally be expected, so its absence would not be experienced as a problem for someone in tune with the conventions for such interviews. This does indeed appear to be the case for w. The example illustrates that the way people interpret features of texts depends upon which social - more specifically, discoursal - conventions they are assuming to hold.
