Orienting: Finding the Way Forward

Abstract

In an ideal world, this chapter and the next would be printed and read side-by-side. To divide the topic of how we make headway in a text, I have arbitrarily taken the idea of orienting as a kind of macro-level, top-down approach, while filling gaps and making inferences is taken as occurring at the more local level of sentences and paragraphs. In reality, interpreters almost certainly oscillate between the two.