Conversational Implicatures (and How to Spot Them)

Abstract

In everyday conversations we often convey information that goes above and beyond what we strictly speaking say: exaggeration and irony are obvious examples. H.P. Grice introduced the technical notion of a conversational implicature in systematizing the phenomenon of meaning one thing by saying something else. In introducing the notion, Grice drew a line between what is said, which he understood as being closely related to the conventional meaning of the words uttered, and what is conversationally implicated, which can be inferred from the fact that an utterance has been made in context. Since Grice's seminal work, conversational implicatures have become one of the major research areas in pragmatics. This article introduces the notion of a conversational implicature, discusses some of the key issues that lie at the heart of the recent debate, and explicates tests that allow us to reliably distinguish between semantic entailments and conventional implicatures on the one hand and conversational implicatures on the other.

I’m Here Now, But I Won’t Be Here When You Get This Message

“…Unlike conventional implicatures (e.g. the implicature of ‘A but B’ that it is unusual for ‘A’ and ‘B’ to both be true), conversational implicatures are ‘not triggered by the use of particular lexical items in the sentence uttered’ (Blome Tillman , 173) (e.g. ‘but’ in the above example).…”

“…Blome Tillman explains that ‘GCIs need to be carefully distinguished from conventional implicatures: even though GCIs may seem to be triggered by default, they are not part of the conventional meanings of the words used in the utterance’ (Blome Tillman , 181).…”

“…As Blome Tillman puts it, while utterances of the likes of (GCI*) ‘may seem somewhat odd or conversationally misleading, they crucially do not express contradictions’ (Blome Tillman , 182). This is precisely what I would say about a token of (P′).…”

Knowledge in and out of Contrast

“…Schaffer and Knobe consider and dismiss a pragmatic account of the contrast effect that is based on Grice's maxims of Relevance and Quality (Grice 1989. See also Gerken 2012b, Blome-Tillmann 2013. The account they consider has it that knowledge ascriptions K1 through K6 are all true although the jewel contrast "generates the false implicature that Mary can eliminate alternatives in which Peter stole something else" (Schaffer and Knobe 2012: 698).…”

Relativism, Disagreement and Testimony

“…Second, calculability is at best a necessary condition for the existence of an implicature (see e.g. Blome‐Tillmann, , pp. 174ff).…”