The linguistic philosophies of H. P. Grice and J. L. Austin are discussed, and ways of applying their ideas to learning activities for gifted students are suggested. Grice's work focuses on prerequisites for successful conversation, the cooperative principle, and features of conversational implicature. Austin's work analyzes the distinction between performative and constative utterances. Activities for gifted students could involve identification of performative verbs and the ways in which they could fail to be performative. The students could also observe examples of performatives outside of the classroom and then develop their own definitions of performatives and the ways in which they can fail. Austin also addressed the nature of truth in language and distinguished five classes of performatives: verdictives, exercitives, commissives, behavitives, and expositives. (RW)