ABSTRACT
Keywords: context, conventional meaning, cooperative principle, defeasibility, entailment, flout, generalized and particularized implicatures, hedge, heuristic, historical pragmatics, implicature, inference, maxim, principle, relevance, scalar implicature, truth value, utterance-token meaning, utterance-type meaning
5.1 Introduction This chapter explores implicature. An implicature is a meaning that is conveyed but not explicitly stated. You only need to look at my response to my wife’s question ‘When will you be back’ to see how prevalent such meanings are:
(1) I should be back by eight but you know what trains are like
Although I don’t say that I won’t be back by eight, I certainly imply that I probably won’t. And given that I say that I ‘should be’ back by eight, how is it that my wife infers that I probably won’t be? I also imply that trains are unreliable. You could hardly imagine anyone saying ‘but you know what trains are like’ in Japan where you can set your clock by them. Or at least, if anyone did say this, they certainly wouldn’t imply that the trains were unreliable. As well as these implied meanings, I also intend my wife to infer that I’ll be back too late to make the dinner and to buy the lottery ticket. As these implicatures are felicity conditions on Branka making dinner and buying the lottery ticket, this is why what I say counts as accepting her offer to have a meal on the table and letting her know that she should be sure to buy our lottery ticket, the speech acts identified in the previous chapter.
