Implicatures

Implicature refers to a meaning that is suggested or implied by an utterance but not explicitly stated in its literal sense. It arises from context, conversational expectations, and the assumption that speakers communicate cooperatively. Implicatures are distinguished from what is entailed by the sentence's propositional content; they depend on how the utterance fits into a broader discourse.

Two main kinds are recognized. Conversational implicature arises from the speaker's use of language in a cooperative situation and the listener's inference under principles such as the cooperative principle and Grice's maxims (quantity, quality, relevance, manner). Conventional implicature arises from the conventional meaning of certain words or constructions, such as the concessive signal but in "The project was expensive but successful," where "but" adds an implicature of contrast beyond the literal content.

Scalar implicatures are a common subset, where terms like some vs all generate an inference such as "not all" when the speaker does not indicate that higher degrees apply. Implicatures are cancellable in many cases; if further information is provided, the implied meaning may disappear. The strength and direction of an implicature can be affected by focus, intonation, and the surrounding discourse.

Beyond Gricean accounts, relevance theory and other pragmatic frameworks analyze how listeners derive implicatures by reducing processing assumptions to achieve maximal relevance. Implicatures play a central role in pragmatics, discourse interpretation, and cross-cultural communication, and they have applications in linguistics, philosophy of language, and natural language processing.