Page 125 - Communication Cultural and Media Studies The Key Concepts

IMPLICATURE (CONVERSATIONAL)

IMPLICATURE (CONVERSATIONAL)

The kind of meaning conveyed implicitly rather than explicitly
through an utterance. The term is important in pragmatics and
derives from the work of the philosopher H. P. Grice (1975) who in a
quite radical way contrasted the logic of philosophy with that of
everyday conversation. In particular, he pointed out howutterances in
everyday conversation often mean much more than they actually say.
In order to explain howthis can be, he proposed that conversation
proceeds on the basis of a fundamental principle – the cooperative
principle. This can be summed up using four basic maxims, or ground
rules, which conversationalists tacitly follow:

. the maxim of quality states that speakers should be truthful and
should not say things which they believe to be false or for which
they lack sufficient evidence;
. the maxim of quantity requires that speakers should be as informative
as is required for the purposes of the conversation and should say
neither too little nor too much;
. the maxim of relevance states that what speakers say should fit in with
and relate to the purposes of the conversation at that point;
. the maxim of manner requires that speakers should avoid obscurity,
prolixity and ambiguity.

It is on the assumption that these maxims still hold some way, even
when they appear to have been ‘flouted’, that we make sense of
conversation. What happens briefly is this: when a maxim has
apparently been flouted by an utterance we try to derive some
meaning from it that will leave the maxim and the cooperative
principle in place. This inferred, non-manifest meaning is the
‘implicature’. Thus, B’s reply in the following exchange does not
seem literally to meet the terms of A’s question:

A: Where’s Bill?
B: There’s a yellowVW outside Sue’s house.

In this sense it apparently flouts at least the maxims of quantity and
relevance and thereby fails to conform to the cooperative principle. In
practice, however, we assume B to be cooperative at some deeper level
and look for some proposition that would link B’s actual reply with
some manifestly relevant and cooperative reply to the question. In this

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