ABSTRACT
A key insight of Herbert Paul Grice is that an exchange of utterances is ultimately an exchange of communicative intentions. Indeed, our very purpose in speaking is to convey communicative intentions to hearers. For their part, hearers are equipped to recover these intentions because they have certain rational expectations of speakers in a communicative exchange. These expectations are articulated by Grice in his principle of cooperation and fleshed out through four sub-maxims: quantity, quality, relation, and manner. This chapter examines the different types of implicated meanings, or implicatures, that this Gricean framework, and its modern-day successors (e.g. relevance theory), make possible. The ways in which maxims fail or are not observed (e.g. violation, flouting) are considered.
