The course will focus on the interaction of a language's semantics with the pragmatics of language use. The goal will be to compare how two claimed mechanisms of communicating information — backgrounding and information enrichment — interact with one another and reveal interesting features of the linguistic system. To achieve this, we will focus on some themes from the history of semantics and pragmatics (including developing the Gricean pragmatic framework), issues in presupposition triggering and approaches to enriching what seem to be underdetermining linguistic forms in utterances such as ‘it’s raining’.