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Dictionary:

implicature

  (ĭm-plĭk'ə-chər) pronunciation
n.
  1. The aspect of meaning that a speaker conveys, implies, or suggests without directly expressing. Although the utterance “Can you pass the salt?” is literally a request for information about one's ability to pass salt, the understood implicature is a request for salt.
  2. The process by which such a meaning is conveyed, implied, or suggested. In saying “Some dogs are mammals,” the speaker conveys by implicature that not all dogs are mammals.

 
 
Philosophy Dictionary: implicature

Term introduced by Grice for the implications of an utterance that go beyond what is strictly implied by the content of the utterance. Thus, if I am asked what I think of my new colleague and I reply, ‘They tell me his spelling is good’, then although nothing about his philosophical abilities follows from what I actually say, nevertheless my saying it implies that I hold a low opinion of those abilities. A conversation may largely hinge on implicatures, as when one damns with faint praise. Views about the meanings of terms will often depend on classifying the implications of sayings involving the terms as implicatures or as genuine logical implications of what is said. Implicatures may be divided into two kinds: conversational implicatures of the kind illustrated, and the more subtle category of conventional implicatures. Here a term may have the same content as another, but its use may as a matter of convention carry an implicature. Thus one view of the relation between ‘he is poor and honest’ and ‘he is poor but honest’ is that they have the same content (are true in just the same conditions), but that as a matter of the meaning of the term ‘but’ the second has implicatures (that the combination is surprising or significant) that the first lacks.

 
Wikipedia: implicature
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Implicature is a technical term in the linguistic branch of pragmatics coined by Paul Grice. It describes the relationship between two statements where the truth of one suggests the truth of the other, but—distinguishing implicature from entailment—does not require it. For example, the sentence "Mary had a baby and got married" strongly suggests that Mary had the baby before the wedding, but the sentence would still be strictly true if Mary had her baby after she got married. Further, if we add the qualification "— not necessarily in that order" to the original sentence, then the implicature is cancelled even though the meaning of the original sentence is not altered.

This can be contrasted with cases of entailment. For example, the statement "The president was assassinated" not only suggests that "The president is dead" is true, but requires that it be true. The first sentence could not be true if the second were not true; if the president were not dead, then whatever it is that happened to him would not have counted as a (successful) assassination. Similarly, unlike implicatures, entailments cannot be cancelled; there is no qualification that one could add to "The president was assassinated" which would cause it to cease entailing "The president is dead" while also preserving the meaning of the first sentence.

Implicature and implication

The specialized term implicature was coined by Paul Grice as a technical term in pragmatics for certain kinds of inferences that are drawn from statements without the additional meanings in logic and informal language use of implication.

See also

References

  • P. Cole (1975) "The synchronic and diachronic status of conversational implicature." In Syntax and Semantics, 3: Speech Acts (New York: Academic Press) ed. P. Cole & J. L. Morgan, pp. 257–288.
  • A. Davison (1975) "Indirect speech acts and what to do with them." ibid, pp. 143–184.
  • G. M. Green (1975) "How to get people to do things with words." ibid, pp. 107–141. New York: Academic Press
  • H. P. Grice (1975) "Logic and conversation." ibid. Reprinted in Studies in the Way of Words, ed. H. P. Grice, pp. 22–40. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press (1989)
  • John Searle (1975) "Indirect speech acts." ibid. Reprinted in Pragmatics: A Reader, ed. S. Davis, pp. 265–277. Oxford: Oxford University Press. (1991)

Further readings

  • Simon Blackburn (1996). The Oxford Dictionary of Philosophy, Oxford University Press, pp. 188-89

External links


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Copyrights:

Dictionary. The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition Copyright © 2007, 2000 by Houghton Mifflin Company. Updated in 2007. Published by Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.  Read more
Philosophy Dictionary. The Oxford Dictionary of Philosophy. Copyright © 1994, 1996, 2005 by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved.  Read more
Wikipedia. This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article "Implicature".  Read more

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