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In the context of treaty interpretation, new insights from research on language meaning (semantics and pragmatics) offer possibilities for categorising meaning with increased precision. Based on a typology of pragmatic interpretations, the present paper develops a five-step system of categorisation for the grey area ranging from cases where a treaty seems to be silent to cases where the Vienna Convention's general rule on interpretation can still be applied because there is treaty text to be interpreted. The paper explains the typology and uses examples from international law to demonstrate its usefulness in dealing with situations of varying degrees of explicitness of treaty texts. While pragmatics cannot offer a miracle solution, it provides tests that interpreting agents can apply to categorise interpretations on the continuum between clear ordinary meaning cases and cases of treaty silence. It thereby also becomes clearer what exact arguments an interpreting agent needs to provide to bolster a particular interpretation as sufficiently related to the common intentions of the treaty parties.

Building on earlier research, the present article integrates linguistics and pragmatics into the study of interpretation of treaties in international law. This approach aims to make the reasoning of interpreting agents and their appeals to interpretive canons more explicit and transparent. This is consequently demonstrated with a number of practical examples in which the process of legal interpretation and its accommodation of the mentioned norms of interpretation can be adequately described and modelled. At the same time, it is shown that legal language possesses certain particularities, but nevertheless ultimately follows the basic pragmatic rules of communication. Nonetheless, linguistics and pragmatics can only provide an ultimately descriptive account of interpretation, so that evaluative judgements on the normative questions of how to respect the norms of international law still need to be made and – from a normative perspective – the rules of international law are not replaced or abrogated.