Within the research aim of determining to what extent utterance interpretations are assigned on the basis of the meaning of the lexical and grammatical morphemes and syntactic constructions that constitute the sentence versus pragmatically based interpretations, the author examines the assignment of relational interpretations to noun-phrases in Haruai (Papua New Guinea). It is argued that in Haruai, much greater weight is placed on pragmatics in the interpretation process, than is the case in English.