Language and Media Dictionary of Key Terms (April 2016) Martin Montgomery

implicature (conversational) LANG n. the kind of meaning conveyed implicitly rather than explicitly through an utterance. The term is important in pragmatics and derives from the work of the philosopher H. P. Grice (1975) who in a quite radical way contrasted the logic of philosophy with that of everyday conversation. In particular, he pointed out how utterances in everyday conversation often mean much more than they actually say. In order to explain how this can be, he proposed that conversation proceeds on the basis of a fundamental principle – the cooperative principle. This can be summed up using four basic maxims, or ground rules, which conversationalists tacitly follow:

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  the maxim of quality states that speakers should be truthful and should not say things which they believe to be false or for which they lack sufficient evidence;
  
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  the maxim of quantity requires that speakers should be as informative as is required for the purposes of the conversation and should say neither too little nor too much;
  
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  the maxim of relevance states that what speakers say should fit in with and relate to the purposes of the conversation at that point;
  
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  the maxim of manner requires that speakers should avoid obscurity, prolixity and ambiguity.
  

It is on the assumption that these maxims still hold some way, even when they appear to have been ‘flouted’, that we make sense of conversation. What happens briefly is this: when a maxim has apparently been flouted by an utterance we try to derive some meaning from it that will leave the maxim and the cooperative principle in place. This inferred, non-manifest meaning is the ‘implicature’. Thus, B’s reply in the following exchange does not seem literally to meet the terms of A’s question:

A: Where’s Bill?

B: There’s a yellow VW outside Sue’s house.

In this sense it apparently flouts at least the maxims of quantity and relevance and thereby fails to conform to the cooperative principle. In practice, however, we assume B to be cooperative at some deeper level and look for some proposition that would link B’s actual reply with some manifestly relevant and cooperative reply to the question. In this case B effectively conveys that ‘if Bill has a yellow VW, then he may be in Sue’s house’.

The notion of conversational implicature provides an important way of going beyond highly literal and strictly logical approaches to meaning: it is a way of emphasising how the meaning of an utterance lies not just in the words we use but in the deductions and inferences that may be made on the basis of them. But the idea is not without its difficulties. There is considerable debate about exactly how many maxims you need to define adequately the cooperative principle. Some commentators have proposed as many as eight or more. Others have suggested that they can all be reduced to the one maxim – ‘be relevant’. Nor is it certain how strong the cooperative principle is in itself. Some speech genres – such as adversarial cross-examination in the courtroom, the combative political interview on television or the full-blown marital quarrel – would seem to exhibit serious, systematic and fundamental departures from such a principle. And yet, for the theory of implicature to work, it is not a principle that can be applied variably. => PRAGMATICS, SEMANTICS MMO