ABSTRACT
The aim of a pragmatic theory is to explain how utterances are understood, and utterances, of course, have both linguistic and non-linguistic properties. The emotional dimension to speaker meaning is at least as important, often more important, than those dimensions that tend to receive more attention. Any pragmatic theory worth its salt simply must have a view on nonverbal communicative behaviours and how they contribute to speakers' meanings. But when it comes to the analysis of 'paralanguage', there is a problem of definition. Facial expression and gesture, which some researchers do analyse as paralinguistic, are not part of paralanguage. Paul Grice's 'Meaning' is one of the most influential philosophical papers of the past fifty years, and remains a huge influence on linguists, pragmatists and cognitive scientists as well as philosophers. In the study of the information transmission between non-human animals, a distinction is made between signs and signals. Signs carry information by providing evidence for it.
