Implicature and the Gricean Program
The Gricean program explains how speakers convey more than they literally say, deriving implicatures from a cooperative principle and conversational maxims.
Definition
An implicature is a proposition conveyed by an utterance beyond its literal content; the Gricean program explains such inferences as arising from the assumption that speakers cooperate and observe conversational maxims.
Scope
This area covers H. P. Grice's theory of meaning and conversation: the distinction between what is said and what is implicated, the Cooperative Principle and its maxims of quantity, quality, relation, and manner, and the derivation of conversational implicatures through their observance or flouting. It also covers conventional implicature, the typology of generalized and particularized implicatures, neo-Gricean refinements such as scalar implicature, and the rival Relevance-theoretic framework.
Sub-topics
Core questions
- How do speakers communicate more than the literal meaning of their words?
- What are the conversational maxims, and how does flouting them generate meaning?
- How is what is said to be distinguished from what is implicated?
- Can implicature be reduced to a few general principles or a single principle of relevance?
Key concepts
- what is said vs. what is implicated
- Cooperative Principle
- maxims of quantity, quality, relation, manner
- flouting and exploitation
- generalized vs. particularized implicature
- cancellability and calculability
Key theories
- Cooperative Principle and maxims (Grice)
- Conversation is governed by an expectation of cooperation, articulated as maxims of quantity, quality, relation, and manner; implicatures are inferred to preserve the assumption that the speaker is cooperating, especially when a maxim is flouted.
- Generalized vs. particularized implicature
- Some implicatures arise by default from the use of certain expressions regardless of context (generalized), while others depend on the particular context of utterance (particularized).
History
Grice's 1967 William James Lectures, parts of which appeared as 'Logic and Conversation' (1975) and were collected in Studies in the Way of Words (1989), founded modern pragmatics by showing how non-literal meaning could be derived rationally. Neo-Griceans such as Horn and Levinson reduced and systematized the maxims, while Sperber and Wilson proposed Relevance Theory as a cognitively grounded alternative.
Debates
- Number and reducibility of the maxims
- Whether Grice's several maxims should be retained, reduced to a small set of principles (as in neo-Gricean Q- and R-principles), or replaced by a single principle of relevance.
Key figures
- H. P. Grice
- Laurence Horn
- Stephen Levinson
- Dan Sperber
- Deirdre Wilson
Related topics
Seminal works
- grice1975
- grice1989
- levinson1983
Frequently asked questions
- What is the difference between what is said and what is implicated?
- What is said is the literal, truth-conditional content of an utterance, whereas what is implicated is additional meaning the speaker conveys by exploiting shared assumptions and the maxims, as when 'Some students passed' implicates that not all did.