It may in fact be more accurate to talk of "inferential preferences" of a
probabilistic nature, rather than "inference rules", so as to allow for the fact
that such misinterpretations are quite frequent (cf. the comments of Lyonsand Aitchison above, and see Klein and Dittmar, 1979 for a good discus-
sion of probabilistic models). Tannen (1981) has recently made a very
similar suggestion, viz. that in explaining how persons interpret indirect
speech acts, the notion of patterns of interpretation is more appropriate than
that of rules of discourse. These patterns of interpretation depend, in a
complex way, on "context, individual and social differences and inter-
personal dynamics" (p. 484)