Conversational implicature

Paul Grice identified three types of general conversational implicature: 1. The speaker deliberately flouts a conversational maxim to convey an additional meaning not expressed literally. For instance, a speaker responds to the question "How did you like the guest speaker?" with the following utterance: Well, Im sure he was speaking English. If the speaker is assumed to be following the cooperative principle, in spite of flouting the Maxim of Quantity, then the utterance must have an additional nonliteral meaning, such as: "The content of the speakers speech was confusing." 2. The speakers desire to fulfill two conflicting maxims results in his or her flouting one maxim to invoke the other. For instance, a speaker responds to the question "Where is John?" with the following utterance: Hes either in the cafeteria or in his office. In this case, the Maxim of Quantity and the Maxim of Quality are in conflict. A cooperative speaker does not want to be ambiguous but also does not want to give false information by giving a specific answer in spite of his uncertainty. By flouting the Maxim of Quantity, the speaker invokes the Maxim of Quality, leading to the implicature that the speaker does not have the evidence to give a specific location where he believes John is. 3. The speaker invokes a maxim as a basis for interpreting the utterance. In the following exchange: Do you know where I can get some gas? Theres a gas station around the corner. The second speaker invokes the Maxim of Relevance, resulting in the implicature that the gas station is open and one can probably get gas there [edit]Scalar implicature According to Grice (1975), another form of conversational implicature is also known as a scalar implicature. This concerns the conventional uses of words like "all" or "some" in conversation. I ate some of the pie. This sentence implies "I did not eat all of the pie." While the statement "I ate some pie" is still true if the entire pie was eaten, the conventional meaning of the word "some" and the implicature generated by the statement is "not all".

[edit]Conventional

implicature

Conventional implicature is independent of the cooperative principle and its maxims. A statement always carries its conventional implicature. Joe is poor but happy. This sentence implies poverty and happiness are not compatible but in spite of this Joe is still happy. The conventional interpretation of the word "but" will always create the implicature of a sense of contrast. So Joe is poor but happy will always necessarily imply "Surprisingly Joe is happy in spite of being poor". [edit]Implicature

vs entailment

This can be contrasted with cases of entailment. For example, the statement "The president was assassinated" not only suggests that "The president is dead" is true, but requires that it be true. The first sentence could not be true if the second were not true; if the president were not dead, then whatever it is that happened to him would not have counted as a (successful) assassination. Similarly, unlike implicatures, entailments cannot be cancelled; there is no qualification that one could add to "The president was assassinated" which would cause it to cease entailing "The president is dead" while also preserving the meaning of the first sentence. y
"The probabilistic character of conversational implicature is easier to demonstrate than define. If a stranger at the other end of a phone line has a high-pitched voice, you may infer that the speaker is a woman. The inference may be incorrect. Conversational implicatures are a similar kind of inference: they are based on stereotyped expectations of what would, more often than not, be the case." (Keith Allan, Natural Language Semantics. Wiley-Blackwell, 2001)

Jim Halpert: I don't think I'll be here in 10 years. Michael Scott: That's what I said. That's what she said. Jim Halpert: That's what who said? Michael Scott: I never know, I just say it. I say stuff like that, you know--to lighten the tension when things sort of get hard. Jim Halpert: That's what she said. (John Krasinski and Steve Carell, "Survivor Man." The Office, 2007)

"Generally speaking, a conversational implicature is an interpretive procedure that operates to figure out what is going on. . . . Assume a husband and wife are getting ready to go out for the evening: 8. Husband: How much longer will you be? 9. Wife: Mix yourself a drink.

Implicature denotes either (i) the act of meaning, implying, or suggesting 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. Conversational implicatures have become one of the principal subjects of pragmatics. Figures of speech such as metaphor, irony, and understatement provide familiar examples. An important conceptual and methodological issue in semantics is how to distinguish senses and entailments from conventional implicatures. Implicature has been invoked for a variety of purposes, from defending controversial semantic claims in philosophy to explaining lexical gaps in linguistics. H. P. Grice, who coined the term implicature, and classified the phenomenon, developed an influential theory to explain and predict conversational implicatures, and describe how they arise and are understood. The Cooperative Principle and associated maxims play a central role. Neo-Gricean theories have modified Grice's principles to some extent, and Relevance theories replace them with a principle of communicative efficiency. The problems for such principle-based theories include overgeneration, lack of determinacy, clashes, and the fact that speakers often have other goals. A separate issue is the degree to which sentence meaning determines what is said. Maxim of Quality. Make your contribution true; so do not convey what you believe false or unjustified. Maxim of Quantity. Be as informative as required. Maxim of Relation. Be relevant. Maxim of Manner. Be perspicuous; so avoid obscurity and ambiguity, and strive for brevity and order.