The cognitive and the interactional paradigm clash engendered the current study as it undertakes a reassessment of the cognitive and the socio-cultural paradigms to meaning explication through a re-examination of face management, common ground, and by extension, intention, in the success of the communicative venture. To accomplish this, it addresses itself to such objectives as: to establish the extent of the dependence of face management and overall success in communication on common ground of participants, it seeks to know whether communicative intention is ipsofacto or post facto (emergent), and whether implicature is derived conventionally or collaboratively rather than from inferences about speaker’s intention. The analysis applied the operational schema of face, intention and common ground postulated in the work to empirical data of the Nigerian pidgin radio discourse ‘The World of Herbs’ of the Edo State Broadcasting Corporation, to evolve valid conclusion on aspects of the inquiry. The findings indicate that common ground (items of information existing in memory or the physical environment) served as an invaluable resource in discourse in aspects of the shared pidgin code, mutual knowledge of topical issue, and access to comprehension through lucidity of expression characteristic of the radio discourse. As regards communicative intention, the analysis indicates that it may be perceived as both a priori and post facto in datum, while intention is recovered via implicature as product of intentionality and conventionality. Intentions are mostly displayed or co-jointly constructed (post facto), especially in cases of normative or moral accountability. Overall, implicature is demonstrated as not derived from inferences about speaker’s intention but through projective and retroactive inferencing. This leads us to the conclusion that the derivation of implicature in interaction is a matter of intentionality and conventionality, while common ground remains an adjustable, co-constructed construct in communication subject to participants’ assessment of the contextual factors involved.