 According to relevance theory this is a mistake. Sperber and Wilson (1986) see things the second way. Following Grice’s model, understanding what someone means by an utterance is a matter of inferring the speaker’s communicative intention: the hearer uses all kinds of information available to get at what the speaker intended to convey. The semantic information obtained by decoding the sentence uttered is but one example of such information. But much more information has to be used to infer what the speaker meant — that includes both what she said and what she implicated — by her utterance. So central is intention-recognition to understanding language that the code model, with autonomous semantics at its core, should largely be abandoned in favor of the inferential model. One kind of pragmatic reasoning pervades language use, near-side and far-side, and the areas in which the code model is applicable are basically marginal. 