ABSTRACT
This chapter outlines ways in which listeners form inferences as they listen. Throughout the discussion reference will be made to principles that allow discourse to be interpretable to a listener. Meaning is created only by an active listening in which the linguistic form triggers interpretation within the listener's background and in relation to the listener's purpose. As a short-cut procedure for estimating the sense of the speaker's references, the listener will probably assume that the speaker will have acquired a typical componential lexical map for the terms used. Incorporating these aspects of listener inferencing with the notion of a cultural frame of reference, we can define base meaning for a text as the cultural and experiential frame of reference that makes a text interpretable by a listener. The chapter refers to four aspects of this rather complex notion: cultural schemata, schema and script slots, supporting data, and rhetorical genres.
