Implicature: Gricean, Relevance-Theoretic, and Conventional Accounts

All flashcards

How does a conversational implicature differ from an entailment?

An entailment follows necessarily from literal meaning; a conversational implicature is an inference that can often be cancelled.

What are Grice’s four conversational maxims?

Quantity (provide the required information), Quality (be truthful and evidence-based), Relation (be relevant), and Manner (be clear and orderly).

What does it mean for a conversational implicature to be calculable?

A listener can derive it from literal meaning, context, background knowledge, and conversational expectations.

What is an implicated premise in relevance theory?

A contextual assumption the speaker intends the listener to use when interpreting an utterance.

What is a conventional implicature?

A meaning associated with a particular linguistic trigger, such as the contrast signalled by “but.”

Quiz questions

1. A speaker says, “Some of the guests arrived,” and intends the listener to infer that not all arrived. What kind of inference is this?Answer: A scalar implicature based on a weaker expression.
2. A speaker gives a vague answer because a more precise answer would require information they do not have. What best describes this situation?Answer: A clash between Quantity and Quality.
3. Which inference is generalized rather than particularized?Answer: An inference that commonly arises with little special contextual support.
4. In relevance theory, what is an explicature?Answer: A communicated interpretation developed from an utterance’s logical form using context.
5. In “Donovan is poor but happy,” what does “but” conventionally signal?Answer: A contrast or thwarted expectation between the two facts.