ABSTRACT
Pragmatics is the study of language in use. It is the study of meaning, not as generated by the linguistic system but as conveyed and manipulated by participants in a communicative situation. In this chapter, the author believes to be particularly helpful in exploring the question of 'making sense' and in highlighting areas of difficulty in cross-cultural communication. These are coherence and implicature. Like cohesion, coherence is a network of relations that organize and create a text; cohesion is the network of surface relations which link words and expressions to other words and expressions in a text, and coherence is the network of conceptual relations which underlie the surface text. The ability to identify references to participants, entities, events and practices is essential for drawing inferences and for maintaining the coherence of a text. H. P. Grice uses the term implicature to refer to what the speaker means or implies rather than what he or she literally says.
