Knowra Implicature Implicature An implicature is meaning conveyed indirectly by an utterance rather than encoded in its literal wording. It depends on context and can often be canceled without contradiction.
Gricean maxims : Conversational expectations of quantity, quality, relevance, and manner associated with cooperative communication. Listeners infer implicatures when an utterance appears to depart from a maxim in a meaningful way.
Pragmatics : The study of how language is interpreted in relation to speakers, listeners, context, and use. Implicature is a central kind of meaning studied within pragmatics.
Relevance theory : A theory of communication in which listeners infer speakers’ intended meanings by seeking optimal relevance. It explains inferred meaning through expectations of relevance rather than Grice’s full set of maxims.
Scalar implicature : An inference that a speaker’s use of a weaker expression suggests that a stronger alternative does not apply. “Some” can suggest “not all” because “all” is a stronger available alternative.
Cooperative principle : Paul Grice’s principle that conversational contributions should suit the accepted purpose and direction of an exchange. The assumption of cooperation lets listeners search for a relevant meaning beyond the words spoken.
Semantics : The study of linguistic meaning, including the meanings of expressions and their combinations. Implicature adds meaning not supplied by an utterance’s literal semantic content.
Neo-Gricean pragmatics : Approaches that refine Gricean reasoning using principles such as informativeness, brevity, and stereotypical interpretation. These theories preserve pragmatic inference while reorganizing the principles used to explain it.
Quantity implicature : An inference about how much information a speaker could have provided but chose not to provide. A less informative answer can imply that the speaker lacks stronger information.
Conversational implicature : An implicature inferred from conversational context and pragmatic expectations rather than fixed by linguistic convention. This central subtype can be calculated from context and is often cancelable.
Entailment : A relation in which the truth of one statement guarantees the truth of another. Unlike an implicature, an entailment cannot be canceled while keeping the original statement true.
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