What is Inferencing

This chapter attempts to examine the inferences in the discourse comprehension of electronic mail which has become one of the fastest means of communication around the world. The data corpus was got from one hundred e-mails from eight different faculties in the academic community of Obafemi Awolowo University, Ile-Ife, Nigeria. From the analysis, the authors noted that, inferencing enables the reader to interact with the text and its contextual elements thereby supplying the missing link between the text and the context. The analysis also revealed that the interpretation of implicit information requires inferencing while that of explicit information does not. It was also noted that code-switching aids inferencing in e-mail. The chapter also noted the implications of this growing medium of communication on students, researchers, curriculum planners and reading specialists.