ABSTRACT
Sentences entail other sentences, and in that strong sense imply them. But there are several ways in which sentences or utterances also linguistically imply things they do not strictly entail. First, very often a speaker uses a sentence to convey something other than what that sentence literally means, as for example in sarcasm or in broad hinting. According to Grice’s theory of “conversational implicature,” such implications are generated by a set of principles that govern cooperative conversation. Hearers pick up the implications either by assuming (contrary to appearances) that speakers are being cooperative and drawing inferences from that assumption, or by noting that speakers are being deliberately uncooperative and drawing inferences from that assumption. However, it is not clear how we are supposed to do this as rapidly and as accurately as we do.
