Summary |
Paul Grice coined the term 'implicature' and the two sub-categories of it: conventional implicature and conversational implicature. Conversational implicatures are what speakers means in addition to or instead of what they literally say and on the basis of the particular conversational context in which they made their utterances. More specifically, conversational implicatures closely relate to Grice's Cooperative Principle, "Make your conversational 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." Grice contends that speakers observe this principle as a matter of rationality. Speakers then observer (or ostentatiously flout) Grice's four maxims of Quality, Quantity, Relation, and Manner, and thereby observe the Cooperative Principle. Audiences may then assume that a speaker is observing the Cooperative Principle (and observing or flouting its corresponding maxims) in order to work out what the speaker conversationally implicated. As with all implicatures, however, the speaker can always cancel an assumed implicature. |