Topic outline

  • General

  • Definition

    To start with, during our previous lesson (Cooperative principle and Grice maxims), we have seen that hedges are good indications that the speakers are not only aware of the maxims, but that they want to show that they are trying to preserve them. However, there are some circumstances where speakers may not follow the expectations of the cooperative principle. for instance, in court-room and classroom witnesses and students are often called upon to tell people things which are already well-known to those people, thereby violating the QUANTITY maxim. another example is what can happen in any conversation when the speaker opt out of the maxim expectations by using expressions like "no comment" or "my lips are sealed"... etc. in response to a question. Thus, sometimes in naturally occuring sentences speakers violate some maxims in order to imply or intend to say something else by their utterances, this last is what we can call an implicature.


    Lyons (1977) points out that an implicature is not part of the meaning of the expression; it is rather dependent on the prior knowledge of that meaning. Another point is that an implicature is not carried by what is said in content; it is rather carried by the saying of it or by the entire speech act. That is why the list of possible implicatures of an utterance is always open (Malmkjar, 1998). Grice (1967) defines implicature as the way hearers find out or discover the complete meaning of what speakers imply in their utterances. The following utterance is an example of what Grice wants to say about implicature.

    Have you got any change on you?

    The speaker’s utterance conveys more than what is said in the utterance. The speaker wants the hearer to understand the meaning: can you lend me some money? I don’t have much on me. This is one possible implicature for what the speaker says in case this utterance occurs during a conversation between two friends in a shopping mall when the speaker runs out of money while shopping. In this utterance, the maxim of quantity is violated by the speaker in order to generate an implicature. As it was mentioned previously, there are several possible implicatures for one utterance (Grice, 1967).

    • Conversational and Conventional Implicature

      A distinction has been made between conversational and conventional implicatures (Grice, 1975). Conventional implicatures are generated by the meaning of certain particles like ‘but’ or ‘therefore’. Yule makes almost the same distinction. In contrast to all the conversational implicatures discussed so far, conventional implicatures are not based on the cooperative principle or the maxims. They do not have to occur in conversations, and they do not depend on special contexts for their interpretation. Not unlike lexical presuppositions, conventional implicatures are associated with specific words and result in additional conveyed meanings when those words are used (Yule, 1996: 45). Put differently, conventional implicatures are different from conversational ones in ways that conventional implicatures are not in need to occur in a specific conversation or a dialogue; they may occur in texts or articles in which they are not very related to the context of the article or the text. That is, conventional implicatures do not depend always on the context of the conversation. However Conversational implicature depends always on the context of the text in which it is used. There are specific words in English that are associated with conventional implicatures. These words or expressions implicate by themselves, most of the time not in conversations. For instance, the word ‘last’ when it is used in a simple sentence such as the last page of a book, it means the ultimate item in a sequence. However, when the same word is used in a conversation such as last winter, it implies something which happened before the time of speaking (Mey, 1993).

       Interestingly, Grice’s name is usually related to the discussion of conventional implicature, but it was originally Frege’s (1982) idea. They both claim that the meaning of some conjunctions like ‘but’ and ‘still’ makes the implication of sentences without bearing on their truth or falsity. An example to illustrate that is ‘she is poor but honest’. According to Grice the contrast between being poor and being honest occurs due to the presence of the conjunction but implies the distinction between these two words (Bach, 1999).