  Grice's maxims of conversation [Grice 1975] are framed as directives to be
followed by a speaker of the language. This paper argues that, when considered
from the point of view of natural language generation, such a characterisation
is rather misleading, and that the desired behaviour falls out quite naturally
if we view language generation as a goal-oriented process. We argue this
position with particular regard to the generation of referring expressions.
