... Burgess? (a) ie, Has anybody visually perceived him? (b) A sarcastic comment that Burgess is rarely in his lectures And so on. Pragmatics, and semantics, need recourse to knowledge about the world or the domain modelled. There is, then, a distinction to be made between the literal content of a sentence and the context-dependent meaning of the utterance. With this background, we can examine Grice's notion of conversational implicatures, which he first formulated in the 1960s but revised much later in Studies In the Ways of Words (1989). The first general feature of human conversation is that rational agents engage in conversational implicature via cooperation, on the understanding that this form of co-operative exchange is to their mutual benefit; or at least that there is a mutually accepted direction to the conversation. Such an understanding is, according to Grice, achieved by the agents following a co-operative principle: "Make your conversational ...

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