pragmatics

Someone says "It's getting late," and I hear "I should probably leave." Mapping Meaning visits Grice and implicature to ask how a listener can come to take more than was said, and why what a reader infers is not automatically what a writer intended.

The same words can convey different things in different situations. Mapping Meaning visits semantics and pragmatics to ask whether the line between what a sentence means and what context adds can be drawn cleanly, and what that changes in how a document is read.