"Pragmatics" was defined by Charles W. Morris (1938) as the branch of semiotics that studies the relation of signs to interpreters, in contrast with semantics, which studies the relation of signs to designata. In practice, it has often been treated as a repository for any aspect of utterance meaning beyond the scope of existing semantic machinery, as in the slogan "Pragmatics = meaning minus truth conditions" (Gazdar 1979). There has been some doubt about whether it is a homogeneous domain (Searle, Kiefer, and Bierwisch 1980).

A more positive view emerges from the work of Herbert Paul Grice, whose William James Lectures (1967) are fundamental. Grice showed that many aspects of utterance meaning traditionally regarded as conventional, or semantic, could be more explanatorily treated as conversational, or pragmatic. For Gricean pragmatists, the crucial feature of pragmatic interpretation is its inferential nature: the hearer is seen as constructing and evaluating a hypothesis about the communicator's...