We can appreciate how someone can mean more than they `strictly speaking' say by considering the same thing said in two different contexts. Consider two people, Pat and Chris, who are getting to know each other on a first date. If Chris says to Pat at the end of the evening, "I like you a lot.", Pat will likely feel good about the situation. But imagine that Pat and Chris have been dating for some weeks, and Pat asks, "Do you love me?" Now if Chris says, "I like you a lot," the reaction will likely be quite different, as Chris' statement is taken as a negative answer! The difference does not come from the content of what is said but from the operation of a general pragmatic principle: When evaluating something on a scale of values, putting it at a certain point on the scale implies that all the higher values on the scale are inappropriate. It is our background assessment that positive feeling is ranked on a scale with 'love' higher than "like" which makes Chris' reply in the second context convey "No, don't love you." We apply this scalar principle so automatically that it is easy to overlook the fundamental pragmatic difference between what is actually said and what is implied by the saying of it.
A close examination of most words reveals that they have many different senses and the rules which combine them into sentence meanings will frequently yield several possibilities for interpretation. Usually we resolve potential ambiguity unconsciously—unless someone carefully constructs a joke which turns on an ambiguity. Consider for example this joke, taken from Douglas Adams' The hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy. Ford and Arthur, are stowaways on a space ship.
Ford: You should prepare yourself for the jump into hyperspace; it's unpleasantly like being drunk.
Arthur: What's so unpleasant about being drunk?
Ford: Just ask a glass of water.
The passage turns on the ambiguity of the word 'drunk', which can be an adjective, meaning 'affected by alcohol', or the passive form of the verb 'drink'. Arthur takes Ford as intending the first sense of 'drunk'—with good reason: he's unlikely to mean that someone would drink him. But Ford reveals that the bizarre interpretation is what he intends. The art of the image is the metaphorical treatment of a person as a liquid; the joke turns on the sleight of hand which makes our semantic interpreter lean in one direction before pulling us back in an unexpected way with a disambiguation.
These examples illustrate our semantic and pragmatic abilities in action. The goal of linguistic research into meaning is to illuminate the processes and knowledge involved.