Abstract

According to Grice’s analysis, conversational implicatures are carried by the saying of what is said. In this paper, it is argued that, whenever a speaker implicates a content by flouting one or several maxims, her implicature is not only carried by the act of saying what is said and the way of saying it, but also by the act of non-saying what should have been said according to what would have been normal to say in that particular context. Implicatures that arise without maxim violation are only built on the saying of what is said, while those that arise in violative contexts are carried by the saying of what is said in combination with the non-saying of what should have been said. This observation seems to justify two claims: that conversational implicatures have different epistemic requirements depending on whether they arise in violative or non-violative contexts; that implicatures arising in non-violative contexts are more strongly tied to their generating assertion than those arising with maxim violation.