Languages & Linguistics
Conversational Implicature
Conversational implicature refers to the implied meaning that arises in a conversation through the use of language. It occurs when a speaker communicates more than the literal meaning of their words, often relying on context, shared knowledge, and the cooperative principle. This implicature allows for more nuanced and efficient communication, as it encourages listeners to infer additional information beyond what is explicitly stated.
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eBook - PDF- Claudia Maienborn, Klaus Heusinger, Paul Portner, Claudia Maienborn, Klaus Heusinger, Paul Portner(Authors)
- 2019(Publication Date)
- De Gruyter Mouton(Publisher)
Conversational Implicature was identified and named by the philosopher Paul Grice in his paper “Logic and Conversation”, originally presented at Harvard in 1969. Much of today’s linguistic pragmatics has its origins in the insights of that paper, and concerns itself in some fashion with some aspect of Conversational Implicature. Mandy Simons, Pittsburgh, PA, USA 530 Mandy Simons 2 The Gricean conception of Conversational Implicature 2.1 Implicature as part of what is meant For Grice, what a speaker means by an utterance is the total content which she thereby intends to communicate (see also article 2 [Semantics: Foundations, History and Methods] (Jacob) Meaning, intentionality and communication and article 5 [Semantics: Foundations, History and Methods] (Green) Meaning in lan-guage use ). One component of what is meant is what is said : roughly, the truth con-ditional content linguistically encoded in the utterance. The remainder – what is meant but not said – is what Grice calls implicature . Implicature itself subdivides into two major categories: conventional and conversational. Conventional impli-cature is content which is conventionally encoded but non-truth-conditional (cf. article 17 [this volume] (Potts) Conventional implicature and expressive content ). In this article, we will be concerned with Conversational Implicature : implicatures that arise by virtue of general principles governing linguistic beha-vior. In “Logic and Conversation” (henceforward, L&C ; Grice 1975) and “Further Notes on Logic and Conversation” (hence, FN ; Grice 1978), Grice introduces the phenomenon of Conversational Implicature and lays out the principles which allow speakers to systematically mean more than they say. 2.2 The theory of Conversational Implicature To account for the phenomenon of Conversational Implicature, Grice proposes that there are certain norms of conversational behavior, norms which are mutu-ally known and typically adhered to by conversational participants.
eBook - PDFEnglish as a Lingua Franca
The Pragmatic Perspective
- Istvan Kecskes(Author)
- 2019(Publication Date)
- Cambridge University Press(Publisher)
7 Implicatures 7.1 The Problem This chapter is aimed to add to the preceding chapter in which we argued that the semantics–pragmatics distinction is about how much context the linguistic signs need so as to convey what the speaker intends. As we discussed in Chapter 6, actual situational context cannot help ELF interlocutors the way it does in L1 so they need to rely on what the linguistic signs actually say (semantics), and create a frame of their own that is, ideally, not tainted either by the target-language cultural frames or their L1 cultural frames. Now, the underlying question for this chapter is: how will this approach of the ELF interlocutors affect implicature that is a fundamental concept in Gricean pragmatics? In order for us to answer this question we need to delve deeper into the relatively long, but quite precise, definition of the term ‘implicature’ by the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: Implicature denotes either (i) the act of meaning or implying one thing by saying something else, or (ii) the object of that act. Implicatures can be part of sentence meaning or dependent on conversational context, and can be conventional (in different senses) or unconventional. Figures of speech such as metaphor, irony, and understate- ment provide familiar examples. Implicature serves a variety of goals beyond commu- nication: maintaining good social relations, misleading without lying, style, and verbal efficiency. Knowledge of common forms of implicature is acquired along with one’ s native language at an early age. As you can see, it is argued in the definition that implicatures are acquired at early age along with one’ s native language in a speech community. If that is so, our ELF speakers are in trouble because they might not necessarily have access to implicatures in English at an early age.
eBook - PDF- Hans-Jörg Schmid(Author)
- 2012(Publication Date)
- De Gruyter Mouton(Publisher)
Conversational and conventional implicatures 425 Thus, the explanation is as follows: temporal enrichment, as well as all cases of I-implicatures (see examples 35 to 40) are cases of pragmatic enrichment arising at the level of explicatures. Pragmatic meaning is therefore truth-conditional, when it deals with the development of a full proposition. 9. Conclusion: the role of implicatures in comprehension and communication In this chapter, we have seen how a theory of implicature has become possible through Grice’s seminal work on non-natural meaning and the logic of conver-sation. For the last thirty years or so pragmatics has developed in many fields in-cluding the philosophy of language, logic, linguistics, psycholinguistics, and, in the past few years, in neuroscience. As will be shown, a variety of directions have been taken in explaining what it is to understand an utterance. These have yielded a variety of answers. The first move, which is represented by approaches that mainly explore gen-eralized Conversational Implicatures, defines the understanding of an utterance as a process implying automatic and default reasoning. Generalized conversational im-plicatures and conventional implicatures are therefore defined as being part of the lexicon, and are not the result of any particular contextual device. Another development, which is currently inciting research, tries to include as-pects of non-explicit meaning (primarily presuppositions and implicatures) in a very general, layered theory of meaning. For instance, Potts (2005: 23) has devel-oped a theory of meaning that distinguishes between context-dependent meanings, including Conversational Implicatures and pragmatic presuppositions, and entail-ments, including at-issue entailments, conventional presuppositions and conven-tional implicatures. This development represents a strong intrusion of formal sem-antic techniques and of the semantic agenda into the classic domain of pragmatics.
eBook - PDFThoughts and Utterances
The Pragmatics of Explicit Communication
- Robyn Carston(Author)
- 2008(Publication Date)
- Wiley-Blackwell(Publisher)
Con-versational implicature was seen as an important and ‘useful philosophical tool’ by Grice and other philosophers in the 1970s (for instance, Walker 1975). Its use in linguistic pragmatics and, even more so, its treatment as a level of representation in 104 The Explicit/Implicit Distinction an account of utterance processing were later developments. It is possible that its character has altered somewhat in these different hands, a point I’ll try to bear in mind when making comparisons between Grice’s philosophical pragmatics and the cognitive processing pragmatics developed within relevance theory. 2.2.2 Contextual contributions to ‘what is said’ The small gap between the conventional linguistic meaning that contributes to truth-conditional content and the complete truth-conditional content or ‘what is said’, is, on Grice’s conception (at least in the second lecture), bridged by reference assign-ment and by sense selection in the case of ambiguous words or structures. In a brief discussion of an utterance of ‘He is in the grip of a vice’, he says: ‘for a full identi-fication of what the speaker has said, one would need to know (a) the identity of x [some particular male person or animal], (b) the time of utterance, and (c) the meaning, on the particular occasion of utterance, of the [ambiguous] phrase in the grip of a vice ’ (Grice 1967/75/89b: 25). How, then, in his view, are these non-conventional but essential elements of what is said identified by the addressee of the utterance? It seems that for Grice the correlation of ‘conversational’ maxims with ‘conver-sational’ implicatures was total.
eBook - PDFExplorations in Pragmatics
Linguistic, Cognitive and Intercultural Aspects
- Istvan Kecskes, Laurence R. Horn(Authors)
- 2008(Publication Date)
- De Gruyter Mouton(Publisher)
In RT, non-literal communication does not contrast with literal communication in terms of economy , but in terms of contingency . Literal communication, defined as total overlap between the set of implications drawn from the thought of the speaker and the set of implications drawn from the speaker’s utterance, is very uncommon. The usual situation implies a partial overlap between these two sets of implications (analytical and contextual). Hence, in verbal communication, the normal state is one in which the intended meaning is not literally communicated (and therefore not fully economical), but pragmatically inferred from (and therefore contingent on) contextual information and the utterance. The crucial point of my argument is that intended meaning is inferred rather than conveyed literally . The point I would now like to develop concerns the nature of what is inferred. It will be shown that the nature of the inferred meaning is the key to the understanding of pragmatic misunderstanding in general, and to intercultural misunderstanding in particular. 84 Jacques Moeschler Gricean and neo-Gricean pragmatics define inferred meaning as Conversational Implicatures , either generalized or particularized. This definition presupposes that what is said in the utterance is not the speaker’s meaning (what he wants to convey), but the sentence meaning (what his words linguistically mean; Searle 1979), although the literal meaning (sentence meaning plus background knowledge) is a by-product of linguistic meaning and of background assumptions. I would like to make the following assumption: what is inferred is not restricted to implicatures, but also contributes to the explicatures of the utterance (Sperber and Wilson 1986; Wilson and Sperber 2004). An explicature results from the enrichment of the logical form, that is, the propositional form of the utterance.
- Paul Kroeger(Author)
- 2018(Publication Date)
- Language Science Press(Publisher)
Bu t since the sentence meaning is identical, the diference in u terance meaning mus t be due to pragmatic inferences induced by the di ferent contexts. As mentioned above, Grice referred to the kind of pragmatic inference illustrated in these examples as conver sational implicature. Ex amples (2–3) illustrate the following char-acteristics of Conversational Implicatures: 1. Te implicature is diferent from the literal sentence meaning; in Grice’s terms, what is implicated is diferent from “what is said”. 2. Nevertheless, the speaker intends for the hearer to understand both the sentence meaning and the implicature; and for the hearer to be aware that the speaker intends this. 140 8.3 Grice’s Maxims of Conversation 3. Conversational Implicatures are context-dependent, as discussed above. 4. Conversational Implicatures are ofen unmistakable, but they are not “in-evitable”, i.e. they are not logically necessary. In the context of (2), for ex-ample, Bill’s statement is clearly intended as a negative reply; but it would not be logically inconsistent for Bill to continue as in (4). In Grice’s terms we say that Conversational Implicatures are d efeasible, m eaning that they can be cancelled or blocked when additional information is provided. (4) Arthur : Can you tell me where the post ofce is? Bill : I’m a stranger here myself; but it happens that I have just come from the post ofce, so I think I can help you. Conversational Implicatures are not something strange and exotic; they turn out to be extremely common in everyday language use. Once we become aware of them, we begin to fnd them everywhere. Tey are an indispensable part o f the system we use to communicate with each other. 8.3 Grice’s Maxims of Conversation Te connection between what is said and what is implicated, taking context into account, cannot be arbitrary. It must be rule-governed to a signifcant degree, otherwise the speaker could not expect the hearer to reliably understand the intended meaning.
- Paul R. Kroeger(Author)
- 2019(Publication Date)
- Language Science Press(Publisher)
In §8.2 we introduce the concept of Conversational Implicature, and in §8.3 we summarize the default expectations about conversation which Grice proposed 1 Cruse (2000: 27). 8 Grice’s theory of implicature as a way of explaining these implicatures. In §8.4 we distinguish two di ferent types of Conversational Implicature, and mention brie fy a di ferent kind o f in-ference which Grice referred to as conventional implicature. I n §8.5–§8.6 we discuss various diagnostic properties of Conversational Implicatures, and talk about how to distinguish Conversational Implicatures from entailments and pre-suppositions. 8.2 Conversational Implicatures Let us begin by considering the simple conversation in (2): (2) Arthur : Can you tell me where the post ofce is? Bill : I’m a stranger here myself. As a reply to Arthur’s request for directions, Bill’s statement is clearly in-tended to mean ‘No, I cannot.’ But the sentence meaning, or semantic content, of Bill’s statement does not contain or entail this intended meaning. Te statement conveys the intended meaning only in response to that specifc question. In a diferent kind o f context, such as the one in (3), it could be intended to convey a very diferent meaning: willingness to engage in conversation on a wider range of topics, or at least sympathy for Arthur’s situation. (3) Arthur : I’ve just moved to this town, and so far I’m fnding it pre ty tedious; I haven’t met a single person who is willing to talk about anything except next week’s local elections. Bill : I’m a stranger here myself. When the same sentence is used in two diferent contexts, these are two dis-tinct u terances which may have diferen t u terance meanings. Bu t since the sentence meaning is identical, the diference in u terance meaning mus t be due to pragmatic inferences induced by the di ferent contexts. As mentioned above, Grice referred to the kind of pragmatic inference illustrated in these examples as conver sational implicature.
eBook - PDFPaul Grice
Philosopher and Linguist
- S. Chapman(Author)
- 2005(Publication Date)
- Palgrave Macmillan(Publisher)
For instance, the relationship between Grice’s theory and literary texts has long been a source of interest to stylisticians. As early as 1976, Teun van Dijk sug- gested that the maxims ‘partially concern the structure of the utterance itself, and might therefore be called “stylistic” ’. 18 He argues that a set of principles different from, but analogous to Grice’s Cooperative Prin- ciple and maxims are needed to explain literature. For Mary Louise Pratt, however, the most successful theory of discourse would be one that could explain literature alongside other uses of language. In the case of literature, where the Cooperative Principle is particularly secure between author and reader, ‘we can freely and joyfully jeopardize it’. 19 Flouting and Conversational Implicatures are therefore particularly characteristic of literary texts but do not set them apart as intrinsically different from other types of language use. Other commentators have concentrated on Gricean analyses of discourse within literary texts, such as soliloquies in Hamlet, Macbeth and Othello and dialogue in Waiting for Godot and Finnegans Wake. 20 Conversational Implicature has also proved suggestive in historical linguistics as an explanation for a variety of meaning shifts. The basic Gricean Pragmatics 189 premiss of this research is that meaning that is initially associated with a word or phrase as an implicature can, over time, become part of its semantic meaning. Peter Cole describes this process as ‘the lexicaliza- tion of conversational meaning’. 21 Elizabeth Traugott’s work in this area has drawn on a wide range of historical data. For instance, in a 1989 paper she traces a general trend in the history of English for changes from deontic to epistemic meanings; both words and grammatical forms that started out as weakly subjective become strongly subjective. For instance, ‘you must go’ changes its meaning from permission in Old English to expectation in Present Day English.
eBook - PDF- Keith Allan, Kasia M. Jaszczolt(Authors)
- 2012(Publication Date)
- Cambridge University Press(Publisher)
Rather, he operates on Saying, meaning, and implicating 55 the presumption that the speaker, like any speaker, intends to communicate something or other. The hearer takes into account this general fact, not the content of the specific intention, in order to identify that intention. 3.3 Conversational Implicature Grice is best known, in both linguistics and philosophy, for his theory of Conversational Implicature. It was sketched in a section (III) of his 1961 paper, and developed in his William James Lectures at Harvard in 1967, which were subsequently published individually in disparate places and eventually collected as Part I of the posthumous Grice 1989. The main ideas are laid out in “Logic and Conversation” (Grice 1975/1989), which, from what I have been able to ascertain from Google Scholar, is the most cited philosophy paper ever published. Grice’s basic idea was not new, although his name for it was. What distinguished his work from previous work on “contextual” or “pragmatic” implication (see Hungerland 1960) was his ingenious account of how it works (it also served as an antidote to the excesses of ordinary language philosophy, in ways chronicled in Chapman 2005). This account was essentially an extension of his theory of speaker meaning, but what made it original, as we will see, was the role of his “Cooperative Principle” and the various “maxims of conversation” that fall under it. In Grice’s view one can mean something either by saying it or by saying (or “making as if to say”) something else. What one implicates by saying something is generally not implied by what one says. That is why Grice used the verb “implicate” rather than “imply” and the neologism “implicature” rather than “implication.” For example, suppose you are asked about a dinner you had at an expensive restaurant, and you reply, “It didn’t make me sick.” Your saying this implicates that it was not very good. However, what you said obviously does not imply this.
eBook - PDFLinguistic Fundamentals for Natural Language Processing II
100 Essentials from Semantics and Pragmatics
- Emily M. Bender, Alex Lascarides(Authors)
- 2022(Publication Date)
- Springer(Publisher)
163 C H A P T E R 13 Implicature and Dialogue #89 Implicature is an implied meaning that goes beyond what the speaker explicitly expressed. Speakers often convey content that goes beyond the lexical and compositional semantics of their utterances—recall the distinction we made in #4 between sentence meaning and speaker mean- ing. Any aspect of the speaker’s meaning that is not a part of sentence meaning (i.e., the meaning that is derivable just from linguistic form, independently of its context of use) is called an impli- cature [Grice, 1975]. 1 For example, B’s response in (284) implicates that either B doesn’t know whether the kids picked up all their toys or that B knows that they picked up some but not all of them (this is an example of a scalar implicature); in (285), B implicates that A can get gas at the gas station around the corner; in (286), B implicates a negative answer to the question; and in (287), the speaker implicates that Kim and Sandy adopted a baby and then got married: (284) A: Did the kids pick up their toys from the floor? B: They picked up some of them. (285) A: I’m out of gas. B: There’s a gas station around the corner (286) A: Are you coming out tonight? B: I have to work. (287) Kim and Sandy adopted a baby and got married. A characteristic feature of implicatures is that, unlike logical entailments, they can be overridden by adding further content to the discourse: (288) A: Did the kid pick up their toys from the floor? B: They picked up some of them; in fact, remarkably, they picked up all of them. (289) A: I’m out of gas. B: There’s a gas station around the corner, but it’s shut. (290) A: Are you coming out tonight? B: I have to work, but I’ll come out anyway. (291) Kim and Sandy adopted a baby and got married, but not in that order. 1 We’ll return to where presuppositions, discussed in Chapter 11, fit into this picture in #90. 164 13. IMPLICATURE AND DIALOGUE #90 Implicatures can be conversational or conventional.
eBook - PDFUnderstanding the lexicon
meaning, sense and world knowledge in lexical semantics
- Werner Hüllen, Rainer Schulze, Werner Hüllen, Rainer Schulze(Authors)
- 2011(Publication Date)
- De Gruyter(Publisher)
Ekkehard König gratefully acknowledges the financial support received from the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (Reisebeihilfe Ko 497/3-1). 111 Seme interesting suggestions and discussions of such phenomena can be found in Geis/Zwicky (1971), Cole (1975), Abraham (1976), Fleishman (1983) and Manoliu-Manea (1987). Our paper is partly based on these earlier studies, but differs fron them insofar as an attempt will be made (a) to give a more systematic ac-count of the domains in which such phenomena can be observed, (b) to charac-terize the general properties of such changes and (c) to mark off such proc-esses of semantic change from other processes, such as metaphorical transfer, metonymic change, bleaching, etc. 1. Conversational Implicature The notion of 'Conversational Implicature 1 was introduced by Grice (1975, 1978), who opposed it to the truth-conditional content of an expression, i.e. to what is 'said 1 in the strict sense of the word. This notion is meant to provide an explicit account of how it is possible to mean more than what is actually said. The basis for this kind of pragmatic inference is seen in some general princi-ples of cooperative interaction, in four basic maxims of conversation which jointly express a cooperative principle. Several types of maxims have been distinguished in the literature. The para-meters used for such distinctions are (i) the role of the context (particular-ized vs. generalized inplicatures), (ii) the question of whether the impli-catures arise fron observing or flouting the maxims (standard implicatures vs. exploitations) and (iii) the identity of the maxims that give rise to the im-plicature (Q-based vs. R-based urplicatures). The types of inplicatures that are of particular interest to us are the gener-alized and the standard ones. 'Generalized 1 implicatures do not require any particular contextual conditions, in contrast to 'particularized' ones.
eBook - PDF- Sandrine Zufferey, Jacques Moeschler, Anne Reboul(Authors)
- 2019(Publication Date)
- Cambridge University Press(Publisher)
67 Part II Types of Implicature 68 69 69 4 Particularized Conversational Implicatures: Why There Are Conversational Implicatures 4.1 INTRODUCTION In Chapter 1, we introduced the Gricean distinction between generalized Conversational Implicatures (GCIs) and particularized Conversational Implicatures (PCIs). Given the Gricean approach, where implicatures are mostly derived from a comparison between what the speaker actually said (her utterance) and what she might have said but did not say (the alternative(s) to her utterance), the dis- tinction is grounded in how the set of alternatives is determined. In GCIs (of which scalar implicatures are the epitome, see Chapter 6), the set of alternatives is lexically determined. In PCIs, the set of alternatives is contextually determined. In both cases, however, the Gricean mechanism of implicature derivation implies that the hearer will reason from the actual utterance and the set of alternatives, under the premise that the speaker complied with the Principle of Cooperation. This means that attribution of mental states to the speaker (e.g. beliefs and intentions) will be crucial to the process. This part of the Gricean account has raised some doubts as this would make the mechanism very cumbersome, while discourse processing is very fast (people produce ten to twelve utterances per minute, which means that each utterance takes about 6 seconds to produce and, one would presume, to interpret; see Bickerton 2014: 36). This makes it rather unlikely that anything as complicated as the mech- anism described by Grice can be operational in implicature deriv- ation. It is noteworthy that Grice himself insisted that his ‘logic of conversation’ was not intended as psychologically realistic. Rather the Principle of Cooperation and the attendant maxims are supposed to be norms that apply to rational communication (and not even spe- cifically to linguistic communication).
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