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Semantics and Pragmatics

Introduction

Semantics and Pragmatics examines how linguistic expressions carry meaning and how speakers and hearers use context to communicate more than words literally encode. At university level, the subject sits at the intersection of Linguistics, Philosophy of language, Logic, Cognitive science, Communication studies, and increasingly Natural language processing. Semantics asks how conventional linguistic meaning is structured and composed. Pragmatics asks how utterance meaning depends on speakers, hearers, situations, shared assumptions, goals, and inference.

Consider the sentence The library is still open. Its semantic content includes a claim about the library's being open at a relevant time. In a particular situation, however, a speaker may also imply that you can still return a book, that there is no need to hurry, or that a planned meeting can continue. Those additional interpretations are not simply stored in the words themselves. They emerge from context and reasoning.

This aiMOOC introduces core theories, diagnostic tests, analytical methods, and practical applications. You will move between formal examples and authentic communication, compare competing explanations, and design small studies of meaning in use.

The semiotic triangle is one way to visualize relations among linguistic symbols, concepts, and objects or situations in the world. It is useful as a starting point, but modern linguistic semantics uses several more precise tools, including truth conditions, logical form, possible worlds, discourse representation, and structured lexical relations.

Learning Goals

By the end of the course, you should be able to:

Semantics: Explain major approaches to linguistic meaning and apply basic truth-conditional reasoning.
Lexical semantics: Analyze synonymy, antonymy, hyponymy, polysemy, homonymy, and semantic fields.
Compositionality: Show how sentence meaning can depend on the meanings of parts and their syntactic combination.
Pragmatics: Distinguish encoded content from context-dependent interpretation.
Implicature: Analyze Gricean reasoning and test conversational implicatures.
Presupposition: Identify common triggers and reason about projection, cancellation, and accommodation.
Deixis: Analyze person, place, time, discourse, and social context-dependence.
Speech act: Distinguish locutionary content, illocutionary force, and perlocutionary effects.
Semantics-pragmatics interface: Evaluate cases where semantic and pragmatic explanations compete.
Research methods in linguistics: Use judgments, corpora, interviews, and simple experiments to investigate meaning.

What Semantics Studies

Semantics is the systematic study of linguistic meaning. It asks what words, phrases, and sentences conventionally mean, how meanings relate to one another, and how complex meanings are built from simpler expressions. Linguistic semantics is not identical to dictionary definition. Dictionaries summarize conventional uses, but semantic theory tries to explain patterns, contrasts, entailments, ambiguities, and compositional structure.

A useful distinction is between sentence meaning and utterance meaning. Sentence meaning concerns what a linguistic expression contributes independently of a particular occasion of use. Utterance meaning concerns what a speaker communicates by using that expression in a context. The distinction is analytically useful even though real interpretation often integrates both kinds of information.

Sense, Reference, and Denotation

A linguistic expression can be studied in terms of how it presents a concept and what it picks out. Gottlob Frege famously distinguished sense from reference. Two expressions may refer to the same entity while presenting it in different ways. The classic type of puzzle is that two co-referential names can differ in informativeness even when their referent is the same.

In contemporary formal semantics, denotation is often used for the semantic value assigned to an expression relative to a model or evaluation context. A proper name may denote an individual; a common noun may denote a set or property; a declarative sentence may denote a truth value or, in intensional theories, a proposition or set of possible worlds.

The distinction between sense and reference matters because understanding a word is not merely a matter of pointing to an object. Abstract nouns, empty names, fictional discourse, intensional verbs, and attitude reports all show that linguistic meaning cannot be reduced to simple object-word pairing.

Truth Conditions

A central idea in formal semantics is that knowing the meaning of a declarative sentence involves knowing the conditions under which it would be true. For example, the sentence Every student submitted an essay is true in a situation only if each relevant student belongs to the set of individuals who submitted an essay.

Truth-conditional semantics does not claim that all meaning is reducible to truth values. Questions, commands, expressive language, presuppositions, and social meaning require additional machinery. Still, truth conditions provide a powerful way to compare propositions and formalize inference.

Useful semantic relations among sentences include:

Entailment: Sentence A entails sentence B when every situation that makes A true also makes B true.
Contradiction: Two sentences are contradictory when they cannot both be true under the relevant interpretation.
Logical equivalence: Two sentences are equivalent when they have the same truth conditions.
Tautology: A sentence is logically true under every interpretation allowed by the system.

The diagram illustrates a subset-style relation that can model entailment: the set of situations where the stronger proposition is true is contained within the set where the weaker proposition is true.

Compositionality and Structure

The principle of compositionality states, roughly, that the meaning of a complex expression depends on the meanings of its parts and the way those parts are syntactically combined. This explains how speakers can understand novel sentences they have never heard before.

Compare:

The dog chased the cat.
The cat chased the dog.

The words are nearly identical, but the syntactic arrangement changes who is agent and who is patient. Semantic interpretation therefore requires attention to grammatical structure, not merely a bag of word meanings.

Compositionality becomes especially important in cases involving quantifiers, negation, modality, tense, and scope. The sentence Every student read a book can receive different interpretations depending on whether one book is shared by all students or each student may have read a different book. Such scope ambiguity motivates formal representations that distinguish surface wording from underlying semantic structure.

Lexical Semantics

Lexical semantics studies the meanings of words and the relations among them. Several relations are especially useful:

Relation	Core idea	Example
Synonymy	Expressions have very similar meanings in at least some contexts.	begin and start
Antonymy	Expressions contrast along a semantic dimension.	hot and cold
Hyponymy	The meaning of one term is included in a more general category.	robin is a hyponym of bird
Meronymy	One term denotes a part of something denoted by another term.	wheel is a meronym of bicycle
Polysemy	One word has multiple related senses.	head of a person and head of a department
Homonymy	One form corresponds to unrelated lexical meanings.	bank of a river and bank as a financial institution

These relations are not always absolute. Near-synonyms differ in register, collocation, evaluation, or distribution. Antonymy also includes several patterns: gradable opposites such as hot and cold, complementary opposites such as alive and dead, and relational opposites such as buy and sell.

Ambiguity, Vagueness, and Underspecification

Ambiguity occurs when an expression has more than one distinct interpretation. Lexical ambiguity arises from word meaning; structural ambiguity arises from syntax. The sentence Visiting professors can be boring can describe the activity of visiting professors or professors who are visiting.

Vagueness differs from ambiguity. A vague expression such as tall may have borderline cases without having several discrete dictionary-like senses. The threshold for being tall can also depend on a comparison class.

Underspecification describes cases where an expression leaves information open that context may later resolve. Distinguishing ambiguity from vagueness and underspecification is important because different theoretical analyses predict different behavior in inference, coordination, and context.

What Pragmatics Studies

Pragmatics investigates how context contributes to interpretation and how speakers use utterances to perform actions, manage relationships, and convey meanings beyond conventionally encoded content. Pragmatic interpretation draws on the physical situation, discourse history, social roles, shared knowledge, goals, expectations, and assumptions about rational communication.

A central challenge is that the boundary between semantics and pragmatics is not fixed by a single universally accepted test. Some phenomena, such as indexicals, presuppositions, scalar inferences, metaphor, and conditionals, are analyzed differently across theories. University-level study therefore requires you to compare models rather than memorize one rigid division.

Context and Deixis

Deictic expressions are interpreted relative to a context. Common types include:

Person deixis: I, you, we, they.
Place deixis: here, there, this place.
Time deixis: now, then, today, tomorrow.
Discourse deixis: this point, the previous section, what follows.
Social deixis: forms that encode or signal social relationships, status, distance, or respect.

The interpretation of I am meeting you here tomorrow cannot be fixed without knowing who speaks, who is addressed, where the utterance occurs, and when it occurs. Such context-sensitivity shows that sentence-level linguistic information can require contextual parameters before a complete proposition is obtained.

Speech Acts

Speaking is a form of action. In the tradition associated with J. L. Austin and later work by John Searle, speech-act analysis distinguishes several dimensions:

Locutionary content: the linguistic content produced.
Illocutionary force: the conventional or communicative act performed, such as asserting, requesting, promising, warning, or apologizing.
Perlocutionary effect: an effect on a hearer, such as persuading, alarming, amusing, or reassuring.

A sentence's grammatical form does not determine its speech act by itself. Can you open the window? is syntactically interrogative but is commonly used as a request. This is an indirect speech act: the speaker performs one act partly through the performance of another.

Speech acts also depend on felicity conditions. A promise, for example, normally presupposes that the speaker presents themself as undertaking an obligation concerning a future action. An institutional declaration such as pronouncing a meeting open may require an authorized speaker and an appropriate procedure.

Gricean Cooperation and Conversational Implicature

Paul Grice developed an influential account of how hearers infer speaker meaning that goes beyond literal sentence meaning. His Cooperative Principle is not a rule that everyone must always be polite. It is a theoretical idea that participants ordinarily interpret contributions as appropriately related to the purposes of the exchange.

Grice grouped conversational expectations under four broad categories:

Quantity: provide as much information as is needed, but not more than required.
Quality: do not present what you believe to be false or unsupported.
Relation: make your contribution relevant.
Manner: aim for clarity, order, and avoidance of unnecessary obscurity or ambiguity.

Speakers can observe these expectations, violate them covertly, opt out, encounter a clash, or flout a maxim in a way that invites an additional inference. If a lecturer writes only The student attended most classes in a recommendation, a reader may infer that stronger praise is unavailable. The inference depends on expectations about relevance and informativeness rather than the literal meaning of the sentence alone.

Conversational implicatures are typically context-sensitive and often cancellable. If someone says Some of the articles were useful, a listener may infer that not all were useful. The speaker can cancel that inference by adding in fact, all of them were. This contrasts with entailments, which cannot normally be cancelled without contradiction.

Generalized and Particularized Implicature

A generalized conversational implicature tends to arise without a highly specific context. Scalar expressions often illustrate this: some may suggest not all under ordinary conditions. A particularized conversational implicature depends more strongly on a specific context.

Example:

A: Are you coming to the seminar?

B: I have an exam at eight tomorrow morning.

B has not literally said no, but in a suitable context A can infer that B is unlikely to attend. The inference depends on background assumptions about the seminar time, preparation needs, and B's communicative goals.

Implicature analysis requires caution. You should ask whether the inference is genuinely intended, whether it is cancellable, whether it survives embedding, and whether a lexical or semantic explanation would be better.

Presupposition

A presupposition is information presented as taken for granted or backgrounded rather than asserted as the main point. Common triggers include definite descriptions, factive verbs, change-of-state verbs, cleft constructions, and iterative expressions.

Examples:

Mina stopped smoking tends to presuppose that Mina previously smoked.
Leo knows that the lab is closed tends to presuppose that the lab is closed.
The dean arrived commonly carries an existence-and-uniqueness expectation about a contextually relevant dean.

Presuppositions show characteristic projection behavior: they may survive under negation, questioning, conditionals, or modal operators. Compare Mina stopped smoking with Mina did not stop smoking; both tend to preserve the background assumption that Mina previously smoked.

A hearer may also accommodate a presupposition by adjusting the common ground. If someone says I need to pick up my sister from the station and you did not know the speaker had a sister, you may simply add that assumption to your discourse model unless there is reason to challenge it.

Common Ground and Context Change

Many pragmatic theories model conversation as a process in which participants update a common ground: a body of propositions treated as mutually accepted for the purposes of the exchange. Assertions propose updates, questions organize possible updates, and presuppositions impose requirements on what the context must support.

This perspective helps explain why the same sentence can function differently in different conversations. The door is open might be a neutral observation, a request to close it, a warning about security, or permission to enter. A good pragmatic analysis therefore identifies the utterance, relevant contextual assumptions, intended act, and inferential path.

Politeness, Face, and Social Meaning

Communication is shaped by social relations. Speakers choose forms that can signal solidarity, distance, authority, deference, irony, stance, or identity. Politeness is not reducible to being nice; it concerns how linguistic choices manage interpersonal expectations and social risks.

Requests illustrate this well. Send me the file and Could you send me the file when you have a moment? can target the same practical outcome but differ in directness, conventional politeness, and assumptions about rights and obligations. Cross-cultural and cross-linguistic research shows that norms differ, so analysts should avoid treating one community's preferences as universal.

The Semantics-Pragmatics Interface

The semantics-pragmatics interface asks how encoded linguistic meaning interacts with context-dependent enrichment and inference. There is no single uncontested boundary. Instead, researchers ask which parts of interpretation should be represented in grammar or lexical semantics and which should be derived by pragmatic reasoning.

Diagnostic Contrasts

A practical analysis can compare several properties:

Phenomenon	Typical source	Context sensitivity	Cancellability	Example
Entailment	Conventional semantic content plus composition	Usually limited once interpretation is fixed	Not normally cancellable	bachelor entails adult
Conversational implicature	Pragmatic inference	Often high	Often cancellable	some may suggest not all
Presupposition	Trigger plus discourse conditions	Often substantial	Sometimes suspendable or cancellable	stopped may background a prior state
Deictic reference	Linguistic meaning plus context parameter	Essential	Not an optional inference	I and here
Indirect speech act	Conventional form plus communicative inference	High	Depends on act and context	Can you pass the salt?

These are tendencies, not infallible mechanical tests. For example, presuppositions vary in strength and projection, conventional implicatures behave differently from conversational implicatures, and some contextual effects may enter truth-conditional content.

Scalar Inference

Scalar expressions provide a classic interface problem. If a speaker says Some students passed, listeners often infer not all students passed. One analysis treats some semantically as compatible with all and derives not all pragmatically from the stronger alternative the speaker did not choose.

The inference is defeasible:

Some students passed — in fact, all of them did.

The continuation is unusual but not contradictory. This supports a pragmatic analysis of the not all inference. However, scalar inferences interact with grammar, focus, questions under discussion, and embedding, so they are also a major testing ground for theories of the interface.

Metaphor, Irony, and Nonliteral Meaning

Metaphor and irony show that communicated meaning can diverge sharply from literal composition. If a reviewer says This article is a maze, the literal category statement is not the intended endpoint. A listener searches for relevant shared features such as complexity, difficulty of navigation, or disorientation.

Irony often relies on a mismatch between literal wording and contextual evaluation. Saying Perfect timing when a system crashes at a crucial moment can communicate criticism. The hearer uses contextual evidence, tone, shared expectations, and assumptions about speaker intention.

Not every nonliteral use should be analyzed identically. Contemporary pragmatics includes Gricean, neo-Gricean, relevance-theoretic, constructional, cognitive, and social-interactional approaches that differ in how they model inference and conventionalization.

Formal and Empirical Methods

Semantics and pragmatics combine formal analysis with empirical evidence. Strong arguments normally rely on patterns across multiple examples, controlled contrasts, and explicit predictions rather than isolated intuitions.

Semantic Judgments

Researchers often test relations such as entailment, contradiction, ambiguity, and acceptability by constructing minimal contrasts. For an entailment test, compare situations where the first sentence is true and ask whether the second could nevertheless be false.

Example:

A: Every linguistics student submitted the assignment.

B: Some linguistics student submitted the assignment.

If the domain contains at least one linguistics student, A supports B. But formal analysis must make domain assumptions explicit; otherwise vacuous truth and existence assumptions can complicate the judgment.

Corpus and Discourse Analysis

A corpus allows you to examine how expressions are actually used across many texts or conversations. Corpus evidence can reveal collocations, frequency, genre differences, semantic prosody, discourse markers, and patterns of pragmatic inference.

For example, you could compare the discourse marker actually in academic writing, interviews, and informal conversation. You would code its local function, position, relation to prior discourse, and interaction with stance or correction.

Experimental Pragmatics

Experimental pragmatics uses controlled tasks to study interpretation, inference, and processing. Researchers may manipulate context, wording, alternatives, speaker knowledge, or social information, then measure judgments, choices, reading times, eye movements, or response latency.

A simple classroom experiment might compare how strongly participants infer not all from some in neutral versus contrast-rich contexts. Good practice requires clear instructions, ethical treatment of participants, transparent coding, and cautious interpretation of small samples.

Cross-Linguistic and Cross-Cultural Comparison

Meaning systems vary across languages. Languages differ in lexical categories, honorific systems, evidential markers, tense-aspect systems, demonstratives, pronouns, and conventional discourse practices. Cross-linguistic research prevents overgeneralizing from English.

When interviewing speakers, distinguish descriptive evidence from stereotypes. Ask for concrete examples, test contrasts, and let speakers reject unnatural formulations. For classroom projects involving human participants, follow your institution's ethical and privacy requirements.

Applications

Semantics and pragmatics matter wherever interpretation matters.

Language Teaching and Translation

Language learners need more than vocabulary and grammar. They also need to understand register, politeness, indirectness, presupposition, idiom, and culturally situated inference. Translators must decide which distinctions can be encoded directly and which require restructuring to preserve communicative function.

A literal translation can be semantically close yet pragmatically inappropriate. Conversely, a good translation may change wording substantially to preserve speech act, politeness level, or discourse effect.

Law, Public Communication, and Media

Legal interpretation often turns on scope, ambiguity, ordinary meaning, presupposition, and context. Public communication similarly depends on what a statement literally commits a speaker to versus what it strongly suggests.

Semantic and pragmatic tools help you analyze headlines, political statements, advertising, policy language, and institutional communication without assuming that implication and assertion are the same thing. This distinction is essential when evaluating responsibility, deniability, framing, and misleading communication.

Human-Computer Interaction and Natural Language Processing

Language technologies must resolve ambiguity, track reference, infer intent, and model context. Dialogue systems need to recognize that Can you show me tomorrow's schedule? is a request rather than a question about physical ability.

Large language models and other NLP systems can generate plausible contextual interpretations, but linguistic competence should not be inferred merely from fluent output. Evaluation should test systematic distinctions such as entailment, presupposition, reference, implicature, and robustness across contexts.

Interactive Tasks

Quiz: Test Your Knowledge

Which statement best distinguishes semantics from pragmatics? (Semantics studies conventional meaning while pragmatics studies meaning in context) (!Semantics studies spelling while pragmatics studies punctuation) (!Semantics studies only words while pragmatics studies only sentences) (!Semantics is historical while pragmatics is mathematical)

What is an entailment? (A relation where truth of one proposition guarantees truth of another) (!A relation where two words sound alike) (!A socially polite interpretation of a request) (!A contextually cancellable suggestion)

Which example is deictic? (The word here) (!The word triangle) (!The word phonology) (!The word dictionary)

What does the principle of compositionality concern? (How complex meaning depends on parts and structure) (!How politeness changes across cultures) (!How speech sounds are physically produced) (!How words are alphabetized in dictionaries)

Which inference is most characteristically a conversational implicature? (Some may suggest not all) (!Bachelor entails adult) (!Square entails shape) (!Red entails colored)

Which expression commonly triggers a presupposition about an earlier state? (Stopped) (!Perhaps) (!Very) (!Quickly)

What is illocutionary force? (The communicative act performed in speaking) (!The acoustic intensity of an utterance) (!The dictionary length of a sentence) (!The number of syllables in a phrase)

Which Gricean category concerns relevance? (Relation) (!Tense) (!Agreement) (!Case)

What is polysemy? (One word having several related senses) (!Two sentences having identical syntax) (!One sound belonging to two languages) (!A sentence lacking any context)

Which method can directly test how context changes an interpretation? (A controlled experiment with contrasting contexts) (!Alphabetizing a word list) (!Counting letters in sentences) (!Copying dictionary entries)

Memory Game

Entailment	Truth of one proposition guarantees truth of another
Deixis	Interpretation depends on a contextual center
Implicature	Inference communicated beyond literal assertion
Presupposition	Background assumption treated as already accepted
Polysemy	A single lexical form has related senses
Illocution	Communicative action performed by an utterance

Drag and Drop

Match the correct terms.	Topic
Conventional sentence meaning	Semantics
Context-dependent speaker meaning	Pragmatics
Truth-preserving inference	Entailment
Backgrounded assumption	Presupposition
Communicated but unstated inference	Implicature

...

Crossword Puzzle

Implicature	What term names a meaning inferred beyond what is explicitly asserted?
Entailment	What semantic relation guarantees the truth of a second proposition when the first is true?
Deixis	What term describes expressions whose interpretation depends on a contextual center?
Polysemy	What term describes one lexical form with several related senses?
Presupposition	What term names information treated as backgrounded or taken for granted?
Compositionality	What principle links complex meaning to the meanings and arrangement of parts?

LearningApps

Cloze Text

The systematic study of conventional linguistic meaning is called

. Meaning that depends strongly on speakers, hearers, and situations belongs to

. When the truth of one proposition guarantees another, the relation is

. A context-sensitive expression such as here illustrates

. The idea that complex meaning depends on parts and structure is called

. An inference that a speaker communicates beyond literal assertion may be a conversational

. Information presented as already taken for granted is a

. The communicative action performed in saying something is its

. A word with several related senses shows

. The shared assumptions participants treat as accepted form the conversational

.

Open-Ended Tasks

Easy

Meaning diary: Collect five everyday utterances whose intended meanings depend on context, and write a short explanation of the contextual clue that changes each interpretation.
Lexical semantic relations: Create a concept map with at least twelve words connected by synonymy, antonymy, hyponymy, meronymy, polysemy, or homonymy, then explain two difficult classification choices.
Ambiguity: Photograph or transcribe three naturally occurring ambiguous signs, headlines, or notices, and rewrite each one to remove the ambiguity while preserving the intended message.
Deixis: Draw a scene containing a speaker, hearer, location, and timeline, then annotate how I, you, here, there, now, and tomorrow would be interpreted from that deictic center.

Standard

Conversational implicature: Record or reconstruct a short dialogue containing an implicature, identify the likely Gricean reasoning, and test whether the inference can be cancelled without contradiction.
Speech act: Observe ten requests in public, classroom, workplace, or media interactions, classify their directness and illocutionary force, and discuss how social roles influence wording.
Presupposition trigger: Build a mini dataset of eight examples using factive verbs, change-of-state verbs, definite descriptions, or clefts, then test which presuppositions survive negation and questioning.
Corpus pragmatics: Use a freely accessible corpus or a collection of public texts to study one discourse marker such as actually, well, or so, and present a table of at least three recurring functions.

Advanced

Experimental pragmatics: Design and pilot a small experiment comparing scalar inferences from some across two contexts, state a hypothesis, collect consented responses, summarize the results, and discuss limitations.
Cross-linguistic pragmatics: Interview speakers of at least two languages about requesting, refusing, or addressing people of different status, then compare examples without treating individual responses as universal cultural rules.
Semantics-pragmatics interface: Write a 1,500-word position paper on one contested phenomenon such as presupposition, metaphor, conditionals, or scalar inference, comparing at least two theoretical analyses and defending a reasoned conclusion.
Multimedia linguistics project: Produce a five-minute educational video or interactive presentation that teaches one difficult distinction in semantics and pragmatics using original examples, diagrams, and a short learner activity.

Learning Assessment

Semantic reasoning assessment: Given a set of sentence pairs, classify entailment, contradiction, equivalence, or independence and justify each decision with possible situations or counterexamples.
Context reconstruction assessment: Infer at least two plausible meanings for an underspecified utterance, specify the contextual assumptions needed for each, and explain which parts are semantic and which are pragmatic.
Implicature analysis assessment: Analyze a short dialogue for what is said, what is implicated, which alternatives matter, how the inference is derived, and whether it is cancellable.
Presupposition projection assessment: Predict the fate of a presupposition under negation, questioning, conditionals, and attitude reports, then compare your predictions with native-speaker judgments.
Speech act transfer assessment: Rewrite the same practical request for a close friend, a professor, a customer-service interaction, and a formal institutional email, then explain differences in force, politeness, and social assumptions.
Research design assessment: Propose a corpus or experimental study that could distinguish between a semantic and a pragmatic hypothesis, including variables, evidence, alternative explanations, and ethical considerations.

Evidence of Learning

Knowledge: You can accurately explain core concepts including truth conditions, compositionality, entailment, lexical relations, deixis, implicature, presupposition, common ground, and speech acts.
Analytical skills: You can separate encoded content from contextual inference, construct counterexamples, diagnose ambiguity, test cancellation and projection, and compare alternative analyses.
Research skills: You can collect and code linguistic examples, use corpus or experimental evidence responsibly, formulate hypotheses, and acknowledge limitations.
Products: Your portfolio contains annotated examples, semantic maps, discourse analyses, a research design or pilot study, and at least one explanatory text, image, presentation, or video.
Transfer: You can apply semantics and pragmatics to translation, language teaching, law, media analysis, human-computer interaction, and everyday communication.

OERs on the Topic

The following open resources can support deeper study. Use them to compare terminology, examples, and theoretical choices rather than treating any single source as the final word.

English Wikipedia: Semantics

English Wikipedia: Pragmatics

MIT OpenCourseWare: Language and its Structure III: Semantics and Pragmatics

Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: Pragmatics

Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: Presupposition

Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: Paul Grice