In our everyday life we continually interact with each other. We do this through linguistic and non-linguistic means such as facial expressions, gestures, and bodily movements. Undoubtedly, to build a successful society and peaceful relations with one another, it is essential not to misinterpret any piece of information encoded by a speaker. As a matter of fact, people do not always communicate with each other in an explicit manner and it often becomes a real challenge to grasp a speaker's implicit meaning or their hidden thoughts and intentions, which may not be so vividly expressed in his/her speech.

Actually, when communicating with each other we usually omit stating a good deal of information which we surely know, or at least assume, that all interlocutors know. As Verschueren (1999) states, we should just imagine what a person would have to say to clarify herself or himself in a completely explicit linguistic manner.

The world of unexpressed information that an utterance carries along is called background information, which is also referred to as common knowledge or common ground, as it is assumed to be shared by the interlocutors. Besides, as such........

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