While taking the non-categorical nature of the inference process into
account, Gumperz suggests tentatively, on the basis of a number of docu-
mented conversations and direct questions put to judges, that a predisposi-
tion to interpret contextual cues in a given manner may vary systematically
between speech communities. For example, he considers that American
speakers are more likely than British speakers to interpret interrogatives of
a pragmatically ambiguous kind (such as (18)) as requests for information.
Interestingly, the miscommunication between himself and an American
salesman reported by Trudgill (1981) seems to support this view. More
recently, Gumperz and Tannen have examined in some detail a number of
miscommunications, some but not aU of which may be located in the
systematically different types of inference likely to be drawn by a number of
American ethnic groups. Further, Tannen reports that in a study of cross-
cultural differences in inferential preferences, more Greeks than Americans,
when presented with a sample of conversation, interpreted why utterances
(such as Why are you here?) as indirect speech acts (Tannen, 1981)