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Discourse, cultural diversity and communication 19

agement, that has received the most attention in the by now well-known socio-
logical research on conversational analysis. In an extensive series of studies of
sequencing phenomena, conversational analysts have provided convincing evi-
dence to document the many hitherto unnoticed and largely unconscious ways
in which the maintenance of conversational involvement depends on active in-
terpersonal cooperation and show the interactional complexity of conversa-
tional management (Schegloff 2003; Duranti and Goodwin 1992; Levinson
1983). But the main goal of this tradition of conversational analysis is the dis-
covery of the recurrent sequentially ordered patterns or structures by which con-
versations are managed. The focus is on what is common to conversational ex-
changes in general. Conversational analysts do not account for the on-line
processing that individuals must do in maintaining conversational cooperation
with specific persons, nor do they attempt to deal with the role of context and
cultural presuppositions in conversation.

4. Interpretation in interaction

Much of what has been learned so far about interpretation in discourse applies to
situations where at least some level of conversational cooperation can be taken
for granted and some shared inferences assumed. The aim is to find empirical
ways of showing through discourse analysis whether or not interpretive pro-
cedures are shared (see Kotthoff in this volume). What is analyzed is conver-
sational inference, defined as the interpretive procedure by means of which
interactants assess what is communicatively intended at any point in an exchange
and on which they rely to plan and produce their responses. As pointed out
above, individuals engaged in conversation do not just react to dictionary or ref-
erential meaning. The analytical problem is to reveal the hypothesis formation
process by which participants assess what others intend to communicate.
To give a further example:

Example 3
Imagine that Bill had just observed Tom talking to Fred, and Bill asked Tom
what he and Fred had been doing. Tom then might answer, “I asked Fred if he
was FREE this evening.” Bill might infer that Tom is planning to join Fred in
some activity, although literally speaking this is clearly not what the utterance
“meant.”

The process of interpretation here is something like the following: a) based on
his linguistic knowledge, Bill perceives that Tom is putting unusually strong
stress on FREE (here as elsewhere in the paper capitalization marks extra
stress); b) Bill can thus infer that Tom is using stress as a contextualization cue;