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Communicating meaning is a primary goal of everyday language use. One significant puzzle in the study of linguistic comprehension is that the meaning communicated via language often goes beyond an aggregate of word meaning; comprehenders systematically derive pragmatic—as opposed to lexical or semantic—interpretations by leveraging their extralinguistic contextual knowledge. Key to this process is the insight that comprehenders compare what was said against what could have been said—the range of alternative messages and alternative utterances—to enrich their inferences about the speaker's intention behind a given choice of the linguistic signal. In this article, we offer a conceptual framework for investigating the roles of alternatives and how they are used in comprehension. The case studies we present span multiple levels, with the common thread that their surface forms fail to uniquely …