 Relevance theory emphasizes that the rules of language leave all sorts of issues open. Some words have too many meanings: ambiguity. Others have too little meaning: ‘he,’ or ‘that.’ Decoding alone won’t determine which meaning the speaker is using, or which object she intends to refer to with a pronoun. So even before we get to what is said, communication involves intentions on the part of the speaker that go beyond what she “codes-up” into language, and inferences on the part of the hearer that go beyond decoding. And of course when we consider what is conveyed beyond saying, the coding model is even less adequate. In all of these ways in which knowledge of convention falls short, relevance fills the gap.