CONVERSATIONAL

IMPLICATURE
by:
1.Titik Hastuti
2.Eko Suwignyo
Late on Christmas Eve 1993 an
ambulance is sent to pick up a man
who has collapsed in Newcastle city
center. The man is drunk and vomits
all over the ambulanceman who goes
to help him. The ambulanceman
says:
Great, that’s really great! That’s
made my Chrismast!
Understanding an utterance is far
from proposition analysis and literal
meaning interpretation. It is the unity
of what is said and what is implicated.
Grice’s theory of conversational
implicature provides some explicit
account of how it is possible to mean
more than what is literally expressed
by the conventional sense of the
linguistic expressions uttered. Using
this theory, we can infer the speaker’s
real attention, appreciate figure of
speech in literary work, and improve
our communicative competence.
Grice’s distinction between sentence-meaning
and speaker-meaning has noticed the
discrepancies between context-independent
literal meaning and context-determinate
conversational implicature.
Therefore, understanding an utterance
involves a great deal more than knowing the
meanings of the words uttered and the
grammatical relations between them. It often
requires a certain degree of implicitness in
communication.
 SAYING AND MEANING
What is said… and what is meant is not
always the same
In fact, what is said is rarely all that is
meant
* the reasons why we say what we say
matter
* the implications of what we say matter
* what we say is often ambiguous, over-
general or uninformative, out of particular
contexts
So, understanding utterances involves
much more than understanding the
language used
Grice coined the term implicature for
communicated non-truth-conditional
meaning
a conventional implicature is non-truth-
conditional meaning associated with a particular
linguistic expression
e.g.: Even John couldn’t eat the quince and locust
fritters.
a conversational implicature is not intrinsically
associated with any expression; it is inferred from
the use of some utterance in context
e.g: John’s been making a lot of trips to
Semarang lately.
What is said:
‘John’s been making a lot of trips to Semarang
lately’

What is implicated:
‘The speaker believes that John may have a
girlfriend in Semarang’
Grice’s co-operative principle
Paul Grice proposes that in ordinary
conversation, speakers and hearers
share a co-operative principle. He
identifies as guidelines of four basic
maxims of conversation or general
principles underlying the efficient co-
operative use of language, which
jointly express a general co-
operative principle. These principles
are expressed as follows:
 Cooperative principle

content form

manner
quality relation
quantity

What to say
How to say it.
 The maxim of Quality
Try to make your contribution one
that is true, specifically:
 Contribute only what you know to be
true.
 Do not say false things. Do not say
things for which you lack evidence

The maxim of Quantity

 Make your contribution as
informative as is required. Do not
say more than is required
 The maxim of Relevance
 Make your contributions relevant
The maxim of Manner
Be perspicuous, and specifically:
 Avoid obscurity
 Avoid ambiguity
 Be brief
 Be orderly
 Presupposition

words, linguistic
expressions or
grammatical
structures

Hearer’s
Speaker’ thought
s
thought
Conversational Implicature

Co-operative
principle & the
four maxims
relevance
quality Hearer’s
Speaker’ quantity thought
s thought manner
 Conventional Implicature

Co-operative
Meaning of specific words in principle
the exchanges & the four maxims

but,
therefore,
Speaker’s and, Hearer’s
or,
thought even, thought
yet, …
The observation and flout of the CP:
Jenny Thomas(1995: 72)
Observing the maxim
non-observance
– Flouting
– Violating
– Infringing
– opting-out
– Suspending
Observing the maxims
Husband: Where are the car keys?
Wife : They’re on the table in the hall.
The wife
 has answered clearly (Manner) and
truthfully (Quality),
 has given just the right amount of
information (Quantity)
 and has directly addressed her husband’s
goal in asking the question (Relation).
She has said precisely what she meant, no
more and no less.
Violating and flouting

Violating : very often used by

linguists (Yules, other students’
materials…)
Flouting : used by Paul Grice (in
Peccei, p. 27)
Others use the terms with the same
meaning.
Violating and flouting

Violations
Flouting
- … thefailed speaker
to observe
has deliberately
one or morelied,maxims
of the co-operative
supplied insufficientprinciple
information,… [Peccei,
or beenp.
27-28]
ambiguous, irrelevant or hard to understand
[Peccei, p. 27]
Rick : Will
Heyyou
Did Alice
coming
invite
come
toTom
the
to our
wild
andparty?
party
Jerry?tonight?
-…
Alice
Tom I might
::She
My invited
parents hamper
will or
Tom.
she
are will communication but not
visiting.
not.
lead
+> INo.to implicatures
didn’t
don’t invite Jerry. [Peccei, p. 27]
know.
A : (flouting
Can youtheopen
tell methe
maxim the
ofwindow?
time?
relevance)
quantity)
manner)
B : Yes.
Yes [and do nothing]
flouting is effectively an invitation to
find a new meaning, beyond ‘what
is said’ — one that makes the
utterance co-operative after all
flouting is generally associated with
particular rhetorical effects
Infringing
A speaker who fails to observe a maxim is said
to ‘infringe’ the maxim when s/he has no
intention of generating an implicature and has no
intention of deceiving.
Causes:
 The speaker has imperfect command of the
language (a young child, a foreign learner)
 The speaker’s performance is impaired in some
ways (nervousness, drunkenness, excitement)
 The speaker is constitutionally incapable of
speaking clearly.
 Opting out
A speaker may ‘opt out’ of the Co-
operative Principle, i.e. being openly
unco-operative:
Examples:
 My lips are sealed; I can say no
more.
 No comment.
 I’m not in the position to answer
that question.
Suspending
There are occasions in which the speakers do not need to
opt out of observing the maxim due to certain
circumstances, such as local norms, culture, specific to
particular events , or investigation. This category is called
Suspending
Examples:
 Journalist: How many people involved in Gayus
Tambunan’s case?
Susno Duaji: The police has to investigate Mr. X.
 The Navajo tribe: it is taboo to mention the name of the
deceased because of violent or premature death.
 There is an acting community in Britain who avoid from
uttering “Macbeth” as to do so bring bad luck. Instead,
they refer to “The Scottish Play”
 Testing for Implicature
Non-detachability and non-
conventionality
Implicature changes
Calculability
Defeasibility
- non-detachability
… the implicatures are attached to the semantic
content of what is said, not to linguistic form,
and therefore implicatures cannot be detached
from an utterance simply by changing the
words of the utterance for synonyms [Levinson,
p. 116].
John’s a
anbig
mental
exceptional
enormous
brain.
prodigy.
intellect.
clever human being.
+> John’s genius.
- non-conventionality
… the implicatures are not part of the
conventional meaning of linguistic expressions
because the conventional meanings often don’t
need to convey the conversational implicatures
[Levinson, p. 117].
I hate you to the bone. (“hate” conventionally
means “not love”)
+> I love you.
Implicature changes

Implicatures are the property

utterances, not of sentences and
therefore the same words have
different implicatures on different
occasions.
Example : “How old are you?”
 Calculability

The same words may convey very

different implicatures in different
circumstances.
 Defeasibility
An implicature can be cancelled.
The speaker can imply something, and then deny that
implicature.
Example:
 A: Let’s have a drink.
B: It’s not yet one o’clock
An hour or so
 B: Let’s have a gin and tonic – it’s after one
o’clock
A: I didn’t say that you could drink after one
o’clock. I said that you couldn’t drink before
 Conclusion
Many anomalous or contradictory sentences
that could not be interpreted by truth-value
semanticists, may be perfectly well-formed
literary creations. A variety of phenomena that
are troublesome from the viewpoint of formal
semantics has found their explanatory potential
in Grice’s theory on conversational implicatures.
Grice’s work enables us to calculate, or
compute the intended meaning of the utterance
as a function of its literal meaning and of the
context in which it is uttered.
Thank You