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Implicature is a term used in pragmatics, a subdiscipline of linguistics. It was coined by H. P. Grice in 1975 to refer to what the speaker suggests or implies with an utterance, even though it is not literally expressed.^[1] Take the for example the following exchange:

A (to passer by): I am out of gas.

B: There is a gas station round the corner.

Here, B does not say, but implicates, that the gas station is open.^[2]^[3]

Later linguists introduced refined and different definitions of the term, leading to somewhat different ideas about which parts of the information conveyed by an utterance are actually implicatures and which aren't.^[4]^[5]

Conversational implicature

Grice was primarily concerned with the type of implicature he called conversational. Like all implicatures, these are part of what is intentionally communicated. In other words, conclusions the addressee draws from an utterance, although they were not intended by the communicator, are never implicatures. According to Grice, conversational implicatures arise because communicating people are expected by their addressees to obey Grice's maxims of conversation and the overarching cooperative principle, which basically states that people are expected to communicate in a cooperative, helpful way.^[6]^[7]

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.
The maxims of conversation
The maxim of Quality
try to make your contribution one that is true, specifically:
(i) do not say what you believe to be false
(ii) do not say that for which you lack adequate evidence
The maxim of Quantity
(i) make your contribution as informative as is required for the current purposes of the exchange
(ii) do not make your contribution more informative than is required
The maxim of Relevance [or Relation]
make your contributions relevant
The maxim of Manner
be perspicious, and specifically:
(i) avoid obscurity
(ii) avoid ambiguity
(iii) be brief
(iv) be orderly — Grice (1975:26f), Levinson (1983:100–102)

Standard implicatures

The "standard" situation is where the addressee can draw conclusions from the assumption that the communicator obeys the maxims, as in the following examples. The symbol "+>" means "implicates".^[8]

Quality: It is raining. +> I believe, and have adequate evidence, that it is raining.

Moore's paradox, the observation that the sentence "It is raining, but I don't believe that it is raining" sounds contradictory although it isn't from a strictly logical point of view, has been explained as a contradiction to this type of implicature. However, as implicatures can be cancelled (see below), this explanation is dubious.^[8]

Quantity (i): The flag is green. +> The flag is completely green.

If the flag contained any other features, this utterance would not be informative enough.^[8] Such scalar implicatures are treated in more detail below.

Relation/relevance: That cake looks delicious. +> I would like a piece of that cake.

This statement taken by itself would be irrelevant in most situations, so the addressee concludes that the speaker had something more in mind.

The introductory example also belongs here:^[2]

A: I am out of gas.

B: There is a gas station round the corner. +> The gas station is open.

Manner (iv): The cowboy jumped on his horse and rode into the sunset. +> The cowboy performed these two actions in this order.

Clashes of maxims

Sometimes it is impossible to obey all maxims at once. Suppose that A and B are planning a holiday in France and A suggests they visit their old acquaintance Gérard:

A: Where does Gérard live?

B: Somewhere in the South of France. +> B does not know where exactly Gérard lives.

B's answer violates the maxim of quantity (i) as it does not contain sufficient information to plan their route. But as B does not know the exact location, she cannot obay this maxim and also the maxim of quality; hence the implicature.^[9]

Floutings

The maxims can also be blatantly disobeyed or "flouted", giving rise to another kind of conversational implicature. 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. Many figures of speech can be explained by this mechanism.^[10]^[11]

Quality (i)

Saying something that is obviously false can produce irony, meiosis, hyperbole and metaphor:

When she heard about the rumour, she exploded.

As it is improbable that she really exploded, and it is highly unlikely that the speaker wanted to lie or was simply mistaken, the addressee has to assume the utterance was meant to be metaphorical.

Quantity (i)

This type includes tautologies, which have no logical content but can still be used to convey information:

War is war.

Relation/relevance: A: Mrs Jenkins is an old windbag, don't you think?; B: Lovely weather for March, isn't it? +> Watch out, she is standing right behind you! (or the like)

Manner (iii): Miss Singer produced a series of sounds corresponding closely to the score of an aria from Rigoletto. +> What Miss Singer produced cannot really be described as an aria from Rigoletto.

Particularized versus generalized implicatures

Implicatures that arise only in specific contexts are called particularized, while those that are context dependent are generalized. Many of the examples above rely on some context, making them particularized implicatures: thus, "War is war" can refer to different properties of war, or things expected to happen during war, depending on the situation in which it is uttered.

In the prototypical examples of generalized implicatures, the presence of an indefinite article indicates that the referent is not closely associated with the speaker:^[12]^[13]

Yesterday I walked into a garden. +> It wasn't my own garden.

Properties

Grice attributed a number of properties to conversational implicatures:^[14]

They are defeasible (cancellable), meaning that the implicature may be cancelled by further information or context.^[15] Take the example from above:

That cake looks delicious. +> I would like a piece of that cake.

That cake looks delicious, but it looks too rich for me. (implicature defeated)

They are non-detachable in the sense that they cannot be "detached" by rephrasing the utterance, as they are consequences of the meaning and not the wording.^[16] Thus, the following utterances have the same implicature as above:

That fruit cake there looks appetizing.

The dessert you brought is really mouthwatering.

Conversational implicatures are calculable, meaning that they are supposed to be formally derivable from the utterance in combination with the maxims and contextual information.^[17]

They are non-conventional, that is, they are not part of the "conventional" (lexical and logical) meaning of a sentence.^[17]

Lastly, they can be context dependent, as mentioned above.^[18]

Opting out of the cooperative principle

The cooperative principle and the maxims of conversation are not mandatory. A communicator can choose not to be cooperative, for example during a cross-examination at court, or simply out of unwillingness to share information; she can opt out of the cooperative principle by giving appropriate clues such as saying "My lips are sealed". In such situations, no implicatures arise.^[19]^[20]

Criticism

Neo-Gricean accounts

...........

While implicatures are not usually entailed by the utterance, there are exceptions:

A: Did you drive somewhere yesterday?

B: I drove to London.

Here, B implicates via the maxim of relation that he drove somewhere (as this is the fitting answer to A's question), but this information is also entailed by his answer.^[21]^[22]

Implicature in relevance theory

In the framework known as relevance theory, implicature is defined as a counterpart to explicature. 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. All communicated assumptions that cannot be obtained in this way are implicatures. For example, if Peter says

Susan told me that her kiwis were too sour.

the hearer might arrive at the explicature

Susan told Peter that the kiwifruit she, Susan, grew were too sour for the judges at the fruit grower's contest.

Now assume that Peter and the hearer both know that

Susan is ambitious. If she loses at something, she's pretty downcast.

and that Peter intended the hearer to activate this knowledge. Then this is an implicated premise. Further, if Peter intended the hearer to conclude from his utterance and the implicated premise that

Susan needs to be cheered up.

Peter wants me to ring Susan and cheer her up.

then these are implicated conclusions. Implicated premises and conclusions are the two types of implicatures in the relevance theoretical sense.^[23]^[24]

There is no sharp cutoff between implicatures, which are part of the intentional meaning of an utterance, and unintended implications the addressee may draw. For example, there may be no consensus whether

Peter wants me to buy Susan some chocolate to cheer her up.

is an implicature of the above utterance. We say this assumption is only weakly implicated.^[25]

Communicative principle of relevance Every utterance conveys the information that it is
(a) relevant enough for it to be worth the addressee's effort to process it.
(b) the most relevant one compatible with the communicator's abilities and preferences.
— adapted from Sperber & Wilson (1996:270)

Both explicatures and implicatures follow from the communicative principle of relevance, which unlike Grice's cooperative principle is not optional, but is always in force whenever someone communicates – it is descriptive of, not prescriptive for, communicative acts. Therefore, implicatures can arise even if, or precisely because, the communicator is uncooperative. For example, if B knows where Gérard lives, and A knows this, we get an implicature different from the one above:^[26]

A: Where does Gérard live?

B: Somewhere in the South of France. +> B does not want to say where exactly Gérard lives.

Scalar implicature

Under the Gricean view, scalar implicature is a type of generalized conversational implicature arising from the maxim of quantity. Prototypical examples include the words "some", "few", or "many". For example:^[27]^[28]

John ate some of the cookies. +> John didn't eat all of the cookies.

Here, the use of "some" semantically entails that more than one cookie was eaten. It does not entail, but implicates, that not every cookie was eaten, or at least that the speaker does not know whether any cookies are left. The reason for this implicature is that saying "some" when one could say "all" would be less than informative enough in most circumstances. Such implicatures are of course defeasible:

A: Did John eat some of the cookies?

B: He certainly did eat some of the cookies. In fact he ate them all.

Implicatures that do not involve quantity scales such as "some, all", but generally make stronger claims than the literal sense of the utterances, are also treated as scalar in the literature:^[29]

The flag is green. +> The flag is completely green.

I slept on a boat yesterday. +> The boat was not mine.

At least some "scalar implicatures" seem not to be implicatures at all but explicatures.^[30]^[31]

Conventional implicature

Conventional implicatures, briefly introduced but never elaborated on by Grice, are independent of the cooperative principle and the four maxims. They are instead tied to the conventional meaning of certain words and grammatical structures. In addition, they are not defeasible, but have the force of entailments.^[32]^[33] An example:

Donovan is poor but happy.

This sentence states that Donovan is poor, and that he is happy. In addition, the word "but" implicates a sense of contrast. Taken together, the sentence means approximately "Surprisingly, Donovan is happy in spite of being poor".

An example of a grammatical structure producing conventional implicatures is the appositive:^[34]

Yewberry jelly, toxic in the extreme, will give you an awful stomachache.

The implicature here is that yewberry jelly is toxic in the extreme. Because of the mentioned differences to conversational implicatures, it has been argued that "conventional implicatures" aren't implicatures at all but rather secondary propositions of an utterance. Under this view, the sentence about Donovan would have the primary proposition "Donovan is poor and happy" and the additional proposition "There is a contrast between poverty and happiness". The sentence about yewberry jelly contains the two propositions "Yewberry jelly will give you an awful stomachache" and "Yewberry jelly is toxic in the extreme".^[35]

References

^ Grice (1975:24)
^ ^a ^b Grice (1975:32)
^ Blackburn (1996:189)
^ Sperber & Wilson (1996:176–183, 193–202)
^ Carston (1998)
^ Levinson (1983:100–102)
^ Wilson & Sperber (1981)
^ ^a ^b ^c Levinson (1983:104–108)
^ Grice (1975:32f)
^ Levinson (1983:109–112)
^ Grice (1975:33–37)
^ Grice (1975:37f)
^ Levinson (1983:126f)
^ Grice (1975:39f)
^ Birner (2013:62–66)
^ Levinson (1983:116f)
^ ^a ^b Levinson (1983:117)
^ Levinson (1983:117f)
^ Grice (1975:30)
^ Carston (1998:29)
^ Bach (2006, #3)
^ Blome-Tillmann (2013:3)
^ Sperber & Wilson (1996:176–183)
^ Carston (2002)
^ Sperber & Wilson (1996:199)
^ Sperber & Wilson (1996:273f)
^ Levinson (1983:132–136)
^ Holtgraves & Kraus (2018)
^ Carston (1998:3, 5)
^ Carston (1998:14f)
^ Bach (2006, #9)
^ Grice (1975:25f)
^ Potts (2005:1)
^ Potts (2005:3)
^ Bach (1999)

Bibliography

Bach, Kent (1999). "The Myth of Conventional Implicature" (PDF). Linguistics and Philosophy. 22 (4). {{cite journal}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)
Bach, Kent (2006), The Top 10 Misconceptions about Implicature (PDF) In: Birner & Ward (2006).
Birner, Betty (2013). Introduction to Pragmatics. Chichester, West Sussex, UK: Wiley-Blackwell. {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)
Birner, Betty; Ward, Gregory (2006). A Festschrift for Larry Horn. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)
Blackburn, Simon (1996). The Oxford Dictionary of Philosophy. Oxford University Press. Implicature. {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)
Blome‐Tillmann, Michael (2013). "Conversational Implicatures (and How to Spot Them)" (PDF). Philosophy Compass. 8 (2): 170–185. doi:10.1111/phc3.12003.
Carston, Robyn (1998). Informativeness, Relevance and Scalar Implicature (PDF). John Benjamins. ISBN 978-1556193309. {{cite book}}: |work= ignored (help); Invalid |ref=harv (help)
Carston, Robyn (2002). Thoughts and Utterances: The Pragmatics of Explicit Communication. Wiley-Blackwell. ISBN 978-0631214885. {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)
Cole, Peter, The synchronic and diachronic status of conversational implicature. In Cole & Morgan (1975:257–288).
Cole, Peter; Morgan, Jerry L., eds. (1975). Syntax and Semantics, 3: Speech Acts. New York: Academic Press. ISBN 978-0-12-785424-3. {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)
Davis, S., ed. (1991). Pragmatics: A Reader. Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-505898-7. {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)
Davison, A., Indirect speech acts and what to do with them. In Cole & Morgan (1975:143–184).
Green, G. M., How to get people to do things with words. In Cole & Morgan (1975:107–141).
Grice, H. P., ed. (1989). Studies in the Way of Words. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press. ISBN 978-0-674-85270-9. {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)
Grice, H. P. (1975), Logic and conversation (PDF). Cole & Morgan (1975). Reprinted in Grice (1989:22–40). Page numbers refer to the reprint.
Holtgraves, Thomas; Kraus, Brian (2018). "Processing scalar implicatures in conversational contexts: An ERP study". Journal of Neurolinguistics. 46: 93–108. doi:10.1016/j.jneuroling.2017.12.008. {{cite journal}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)
Levinson, Stephen (1983). Pragmatics. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-0521294140.
Potts, Christopher (2005). "Conventional implicatures, a distinguished class of meanings" (PDF). The Oxford Handbook of Linguistic Interfaces. Oxford University Press. {{cite web}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)
Searle, John, Indirect speech acts. In Cole & Morgan (1975). Reprinted in Davis (1991:265–277).
Sperber, Dan; Wilson, Deirdre (1996). Relevance: Communication and Cognition. Wiley-Blackwell. ISBN 978-0631198789. {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)
Wilson, Deirdre; Sperber, Dan (1981). Werth, Paul (ed.). On Grice's Theory of Conversation. Croom Helm. pp. 155–178. ISBN 9780709927174. {{cite book}}: |work= ignored (help); Invalid |ref=harv (help)