ABSTRACT
Grice’s (1968) term (see Grice 1975): in uttering a sentence S, a speaker implies that p is the case if, by having been uttered, S suggests as its conclusion p, without p having been literally said. If the conclusion rests exclusively on the conventional meaning of the words and grammatrical constructions that occur in S, then the conclusion is called a ‘conventional implicature.’ Since Karttunen and Peters (1979) most presuppositions are interpreted as conventional implicatures. Conventional implicatures can be elicited by factive predicates like forget (Philip forgot that today is Caroline’s birthday, with the conventional implicature being: ‘Today is Caroline’s birthday’), by certain particles like
‘No one else is going to London’), and certain types of aspect such as a resultative (The rosebush has wilted, with the conventional implicature: ‘The rosebush was previously thriving’). Conventional implicatures cannot be canceled, i.e. the speaker cannot debate their validity without contradicting or correcting him-/herself, but they can be detached, i.e. there is always a paraphrase that says the same thing without triggering the implicature.
