Abstract: The theory of conversational implicature opened a new way to the explanation of language in use, which led to the establishment of pragmatics. But researchers found the theory was far from perfect. Therefore new theories have been put forward to complement classical Grician theory, which include Sperber and Wilson's relevance theory, Horn's Q- and R-principles, Levinson's Q-,I- and M-principles, and Xu's pragmatic inference system. These neo-Grician theories, along with continental macro-pragmatics, have c...