Where the air is thin , but the view so much clearer ∗

Thirty years after Groenendijk and Stokhof’s (1984) dissertation, the exhaustive interpretation of answers is still one of the central topics in semantics and pragmatics. Groenendijk and Stokhof identified three main problems for a pragmatic account of exhaustivity, which to this date remain largely open. In the present paper I show how these can be resolved by adopting a richer notion of meaning, and taking into account its pragmatic thrust. The resulting theory may be the only one to this date that explains exhaustivity, from start to end, as a genuine case of Gricean conversational implicature.