HU Berlin

Department of English and American Studies

WiSe 2023/24
Prof. Dr. Mingya Liu

Pragmatics
Session 5: Implicature1

1 Recap

A sentence’s presuppositions

• are to be distinguished from its assertion: the main point, its truth-conditions, ...

• project under embedding

– if-clauses
– questions
– negation
– ...

(1) Last night, John had dinner in New York, too.

assertion: Last night, John had dinner in New York too.
presupposition: Last night, someone other than John had dinner in New York.

Projection under negation:

(2) a. (i) A sentence of the form p that asserts a proposition p is true if and only
if p is true
(ii) A sentence of the form not p that asserts the negation of p is true if
and only if p is false
b. If p presupposes a proposition p′ , then not p also presupposes p′

This session: implicatures (Grice: what is meant)

Implicatures are to be distinguished from assertions/entailments and presuppositions,

even though the distinction can get tricky. Conventional implicatures, for example, are
hard to distinguish from presuppositions (Potts 2007).

Some notation:

• +> ‘implicates’
• >> ‘presupposes’
• ⇒ ‘entails’

1
This handout is created based on the teaching materials shared by Dr. Alexander Wimmer. All
possible errors are mine..

1
Entailment vs. presupposition
This is partly a repetition of what we have already done. Entailments haven’t been
made precise so far. They essentially follow logically from the assertion.

(3) The cat caught a bird.

>> there is exactly one cat [in the context]
⇒ the unique cat caught an animal

Presuppositions survive (= project under) embedding, entailments don’t

(4) a. It is not the case that the cat caught a bird.

b. If the cat caught a bird, it wanted to do us a favor.

c. Did the cat catch a bird?

>> there is exactly one cat in the context
̸⇒ the unique cat caught an animal

2 (Conversational) implicatures

• ≈ what is meant, in contrast with what is said

• were famously introduced by the philosopher Paul Herbert Grice
• are derived based on contextual information, but based on conversational principles
[subconscious principles that guide our behavior, define us as social beings, ...]

These principles are

• the cooperative principle

• the conversational maxims

The cooperative principle

Make your conversational contribution such as is required, at the stage at which it
occurs, by the accepted purpose or direction of the talk exchange in which you are
engaged. Grice 1975: 45

Meibauer u. a. 2015:
Gestalte deinen Gesprächsbeitrag genau so, wie es der Punkt des Gesprächs, an
dem er erfolgt, erfordert, wobei das, was erforderlich ist, bestimmt ist durch den
Zweck oder die Richtung des Gesprächs, an dem du teilnimmst!

Conversational maxims
1. the maxim of quality
2. the maxim of quantity
3. the maxim of relation [relevance]
4. the maxim of manner

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Quality

(5) a. Do not say what you believe to be false.

b. Do not say that for which you lack adequate evidence.

Quantity

(6) a. Make your contribution as informative as is required (for the current purpo-
ses of the exchange).
b. Do not make your contribution more informative than is required.

Manner

(7) Be perspicuous.
a. Avoid obscurity of expression.
b. Avoid ambiguity.
c. Be brief. (Avoid unnecessary prolixity.)
d. Be orderly.

This maxim ensures efficient communication: to violate it is to cause the addressee

unnecessary effort in trying to understand ‘the point’.

Special case: scalar implicatures (SIs)

An example from Grice 1975:

(8) A: Where does C live?

B: Somewhere in the South of France.
+> B doesn’t know where exactly C lives

Derivation of the SI in (8):

• B’s answer was less informative than it could have been ⇒ violation of the first ma-
xim of quantity to be as informative as required
• a possible reason: B follows the maxim(s) of quality not to say what s/he believes
to be false
⇒ SI: Be doesn’t know where exactly C lives; s/he would have to guess in order to
go into more detail (thereby satisfying quantity)
(9) a. Anna: Did all of your friends spend the night at your place?
b. Peter: Some did.
+> not all of my friends spent the night at my place [implied answer: no]SI

Derivation of the SI in (9-b)

• Peter would have been more informative [would have said ‘more’] if he had said that
[q all of my friends spent the night at my place]
[quantity]
• a plausible reason why he did not say more: he isn’t certain that q
[quality]
⇒ (i) he either considers q to be false or
(ii) he doesn’t know whether q is true or false

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• (ii) can safely be excluded in this context
⇒ Peter considers q to be wrong

There are contexts in which there is reason to draw the weaker conclusion in (ii), such
as Grice’s ‘French’ example in (8)
Why scalar?

• utterances can form a scale of informativity

• e.g. {some of my friends came [=p], all of my friends came [=q]}
• q is more informative because it entails p
• q’s being more informative means it’s higher on the scale of informativity
• suppose the speaker S utters p instead of q
⇒ SI: S considers q to be false, or at least doesn’t know whether it is true or not

Another case: exclusive vs. non-exclusive or

(10) John talked to A or B.

+> John didn’t talk to A and B [and it is uncertain whom of the two he talked to]

Alternatives involved:

(11) {J talked to A or B [weaker], J talked to A and B [stronger]}

The reasoning process that applies here is a similar one as the ones sketched above.
It ultimately leads to the negation of the stronger alternative.

Objection raised in an article by the linguist Danny Fox (2014) against the need for
Gricean reasoning: in a game show, some boxes contain money, others are empty.
The host knows which boxes contain money and which boxes don’t. As a hint to the
participants, he utters the following clue:

(12) There is money in box 20 or 25.

+> it is not the case that there is money in both box 20 and 25

According to Fox, Gricean reasoning as sketched above cannot explain the SI in this
scenario: the quantity-maxim is deactivated in such a context. The host is not supposed
to be as informative as possible. In a series of papers he argues for a grammatical
(=non-pragmatic) approach to SIs.

Central features of implicatures

• they can be ‘calculated’ [using the maxims]

• they can be reinforced
• they can be canceled

Reinforcement:

(13) Some of my friends spent the night at my place, but not all of them did.

Cancelation:

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(14) Some came; in fact, all of them did.

Reinforcability and cancelability distinguish implicatures from presuppositions:

(15) My cat is asleep,

a.??and I have exactly one cat. attempted reinforcement
b.??but it doesn’t belong to me. attempted cancelation

Overview

semantic pragmatic cancelable reinforcable projection

entailment ✓ × × × ×
presupposition ? ? × × ✓
implicature × ✓ ✓ ✓ ?

Grice 1975 also introduces conventional implicatures, which do not require context
to arise:

(16) He is an Englishman; he is, therefore, brave. Grice 1975

+>

This implicature has a concrete trigger just like presuppositions: therefore.

Exercises

[from Meibauer u. a. 2015]

Which implicature is triggered by the following logbook-entry, and how can it be derived,
based on the cooperative principle and the conversational maxims?

(17) Heute, 27. März, ist der Kapitän nicht betrunken.

Further cases:

(18) a. A: Wo ist Sabine?

B: Ich habe sie heute noch nicht gesehen.
b. A: Wie viele Eigentore hast du geschossen?
B: Ich habe ein Eigentor geschossen.
c. A: Kann ich die Leiter haben?
B: Ich brauche sie nicht.
d. A: Wie heißt du?
B: Ich glaube, Eduard.

Literatur

Grice, Herbert (1975). “Logic and conversation”. In: Speech acts. Brill, S. 41–58.

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Meibauer, Jörg, Ulrike Demske, Jochen Geilfuß-Wolfgang, Jürgen Pafel, Karl Heinz
Ramers, Monika Rothweiler & Markus Steinbach (2015). Einführung in die germani-
stische Linguistik. 3. Auflage. Metzler.
Potts, Christopher (2007). “Into the conventional-implicature dimension”. In: Philosophy
compass 2 (4), S. 665–679.