Implicature

Implicature is a pragmatic phenomenon in which a speaker conveys additional meaning that is not part of the utterance’s explicit content. Implicatures are not truth-conditional; they depend on context and the assumption that participants follow communicative conventions. Two broad kinds are distinguished: conversational implicature, which arises from the strategic use or violation of conversational maxims, and conventional implicature, which is carried by specific linguistic constructions independent of context.

Conversational implicature emerged from philosopher H. P. Grice’s account of how conversation is cooperative. Grice proposed the cooperative principle, together with four maxims: Quantity, Quality, Relation, and Manner. When a speaker flouts a maxim or relies on it without stating all relevant information, listeners infer an implicature consistent with the intended cooperative goal. Scalar implicatures are a common type: for example, “Some of the cookies were eaten” typically implies that not all were eaten, even though “some” does not logically exclude “all.”

Conventional implicature arises from certain words or constructions that inherently carry extra meaning, such as “but,” “however,” or “even.” These implicatures are more a part of conventional meaning than the result of cooperative inference, and they tend to be less sensitive to context.

Implicature is distinct from entailment (what must be true given the utterance) and from presupposition (assumptions implied by the utterance). The study of implicature has spawned refinements and alternatives, notably relevance theory, which emphasizes contextual effects and the cognitive effort involved in communication.