Given the fact that in humans the communication of information about emotional states is ubiquitous, people might be forgiven for assuming that pragmatic accounts of linguistic communication would include quite well-developed views of not only the role of emotion in inference, but also how information about emotional states is communicated. However, for a range of reasons, those working in pragmatics have tended to persist with the view that the mental processes behind reason and passions exist in somehow separate domains. As a result, the emotional dimension to linguistic communication has tended to play very much a subordinate role to the rational or cognitive one. Indeed, in many accounts it plays no role at all. This chapter provides an overview of the issues discussed in the book. These all point towards our principal motivation: our belief that emotional or expressive meaning, along with other affect-related, ineffable dimensions of communication, play such a huge role in human interaction that any pragmatic theory worth its salt must account for them.