Implicature
In pragmatics, a subdiscipline of linguistics, an implicature is something the speaker suggests or implies with an utterance, even though it is not literally expressed.
[2] Take for example the following exchange: Here, B does not say, but conversationally implicates, that the gas station is open, because otherwise his utterance would not be relevant in the context.
[10][11] The cooperative principle Make your 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.
Lists of expressions that give rise to scalar implicatures, sorted from strong to weak, are known as Horn scales:[13][15] Negation reverses these scales, as in this example: "Not possibly" is stronger than "not necessarily", and the implicature follows from the double negation "She will not [not possibly] get the job".
[6] Here are some further implicatures that can be classified as scalar:[16] This is a common construction where the indefinite article indicates that the referent is not closely associated with the speaker, because the stronger claim "I slept on my boat yesterday" is not made.
[12] The second quantity maxim seems to work in the opposite direction as the first; the communicator makes a weaker claim, from which a stronger one is implicated.
Implicatures arising from this maxim enrich the information contained in the utterance:[18] There is extensive literature, but no consensus on the question which of the two quantity maxims is in operation in which circumstances; i.e. why "I lost a book yesterday" implicates that the book was the speaker's, while "I slept on a boat yesterday" usually implicates that the boat wasn't the speaker's.
This is possible because addressees will go to great lengths in saving their assumption that the communicator did in fact – perhaps on a deeper level – obey the maxims and the cooperative principle.
They have no logical content and hence no entailments, but can still be used to convey information via implicatures:[20] Damning with faint praise also works by flouting the first quantity maxim.
[21] B's answer in the following exchange does not seem to be relevant, so A concludes that B wanted to convey something else:[20] This utterance is much more long-winded than "Miss Singer sang an aria from Rigoletto" and therefore flouts the maxim "Be brief":[20] Conversational implicatures that arise only in specific contexts are called particularized, while those that are not or only slightly context dependent are generalized.
[32][33] To determine which of the two principles is used, Horn introduces the concept of division of pragmatic labor: unmarked (shorter, standard, more lexicalized) phrasings tend to R-implicate a standard meaning, and marked (more wordy, unusual, less lexicalized) phrasings tend to Q-implicate a nonstandard meaning:[34] Horn's account has been criticised for misrepresenting the speaker's and hearer's interests: realistically, the hearer does not want a lot of information but just the relevant information; and the speaker is more interested in being understood than in having little work to do.
[35][36][37] Levinson subsequently developed a theory of generalized conversational implicature (GCI) based on the Q-principle.
He argues that GCIs are distinct from particularized conversational implicatures in that they are inferred via a specialized set of principles and rules that are always in force, independent of the context.
[40] As experimental evidence shows, it is not necessary to evaluate the truth of an utterance's literal meaning in order to recognise a metaphor.
[44] An example of a metaphor that is also literally true is a chess player telling his opponent, in appropriate circumstances,[45] Apparent counterexamples to the maxim "be orderly" have been found, such as this:[46] Carston observes that particularized and generalized conversational implicatures are not separate categories; rather, there is a continuum from implicatures that are highly dependent on a specific situation which is unlikely to happen twice, to ones that occur very frequently.
The explicatures of an utterance are the communicated assumptions that are developed from its logical form (intuitively, the literal meaning) by supplying additional information from context: by disambiguating ambiguous expressions, assigning referents to pronouns and other variables, and so on.
[51] There is no sharp cutoff between implicatures, which are part of the intentional meaning of an utterance, and unintended implications the addressee may draw.
[50] Sperber and Wilson originally assumed that implicatures can be sufficiently defined as the communicated assumptions that are not developed from an utterance's logical form, as noted above.
On this account, loose language use (saying "This steak is raw" to express that it is really undercooked) is a case of implicature, as are hyperbole and metaphor.
For example, can weakly implicate that Jane is reliable and stable in difficult circumstances, helpful in calming the speaker, and so on.
[58] Speaking generally, utterances convey poetic effects if they achieve all or most of their relevance through a range of weak implicatures.
Levinson sees relevance theory as too reductionist, as a single principle cannot account for the large variety of implicatures in his view.
In the above metaphor, the phrase "anchor in the storm" has many slightly different ad-hoc meanings, and no specific one is exclusively communicated.
Carston also discusses the possibility that metaphors cannot be fully explained by communicated assumptions at all, be they explicatures or implicatures, but with other concepts such as evoking mental images, sensations and feelings.
[64] They are instead tied to the conventional meaning of certain particles and phrases such as "but, although, however, nevertheless, moreover, anyway, whereas, after all, even, yet, still, besides",[65] verbs such as "deprive, spare",[66] and possibly also to grammatical structures.
Rieber takes above sentence to mean "Donovan is poor and (I suggest this contrasts) happy" and calls it a tacit (i.e. silent, implied) performative.
Blakemore claims that "but" does not convey a proposition, and does not work by encoding a concept at all, but by constraining the addressee's interpretation procedure.
