Conversational Implicature

Conversational implicatures are meanings a speaker conveys, beyond what is literally said, by relying on the assumption that the conversation is cooperative.

Definition

A conversational implicature is a non-conventional, defeasible inference about a speaker's meaning, derived from the literal content together with the Cooperative Principle and the maxims.

Scope

This topic covers the core Gricean notion of conversational implicature: how implicatures are calculated from the literal content, the context, and the maxims; the diagnostic properties of conversational implicatures, especially cancellability (defeasibility), non-detachability, calculability, and non-conventionality; and the contrast between observing and flouting maxims to generate figurative and indirect meanings such as irony and metaphor.

Core questions

• How is a conversational implicature calculated from what is said?
• What properties distinguish conversational implicature from other kinds of meaning?
• How does flouting a maxim generate figurative meaning?
• Why are conversational implicatures cancellable?

Key concepts

• calculability
• cancellability / defeasibility
• non-detachability
• non-conventionality
• flouting maxims
• irony and metaphor as implicature

Key theories

Calculability from the maxims

A conversational implicature can be worked out by reasoning from the literal content, the Cooperative Principle, and the maxims, on the assumption that the speaker is being cooperative.

Defining properties of implicature

Conversational implicatures are cancellable, non-detachable, calculable, and non-conventional, a set of diagnostics used to identify them and to distinguish them from entailments and conventional implicatures.

History

Grice introduced conversational implicature in his 1967 William James Lectures to show how speakers can mean more than they say while keeping semantics relatively simple. The notion and its diagnostic properties were elaborated in 'Logic and Conversation' and became the cornerstone of pragmatic theory, prompting extensive work on which inferences qualify as genuine implicatures.

Debates

The semantics-pragmatics boundary

Whether certain enrichments of utterance meaning belong to what is said or to implicature, a dispute that shapes where the line between semantics and pragmatics falls.

Key figures

• H. P. Grice
• Stephen Levinson
• Laurence Horn

Seminal works

• grice1975
• grice1989

Frequently asked questions

What does it mean that an implicature is cancellable?

It means the speaker can explicitly deny or suspend the implied meaning without contradiction, as in 'Some, in fact all, of the guests arrived', which cancels the usual implicature that not all arrived.