The theme that runs through this chapter and the next is that listening is not the ‘passive’ skill it was once said to be. The listener does not meekly receive a ready-made message transmitted by a speaker. Far from it: the listener has to remake the message (Brown, 1995: Chap. 1). The end product may be something that is markedly different from what the speaker intended; it may even be something that reflects the goals of the listener rather than those of the speaker.

Meaning building can be thought of as broadly fulfilling two important functions. One is to amplify what the speaker says by adding in information that the speaker has taken for granted. The other is to organise the information that has been received. The listener has to decide which pieces are important, trace connections between them, build them into a coherent line of argument and check that they are consistent with what has gone before. We will consider the two functions separately, looking at the first in this chapter and the second in Chapter 13. But it is important to realise that this is just a matter of convenience. The functions are very closely interlinked and certain meaning-building processes (such as recognising the links between sentences) serve both purposes.