Book: Conflicts in Interpretation
Chapter: Rhetorical structure
Blurb:
This chapter focuses on a strategy of persuasion and argues that in order to persuade their audience, speakers effectively use their implicit linguistic knowledge of how hearers arrive at the optimal interpretation of a speaker’s utterance. The chapter illustrates this use of bidirectional optimization with an alternation in the order in which a when-clause and a main clause are presented and the concomitant interpretations.