The cooperative principle proposes four maxims in communication. When any of the four maxims is violated or flouted, misunderstanding or implicature, and thus humor might be generated. Humor can also be studied pragmatically within the framework of the relevance theory, which proposes that communication is a process of ostension and inference and differentiates the maximal relevance and optimal...

Making inferences beyond the literal meaning of sentences occurs with certain scalar expressions via scalar implicatures. For example, adults usually interpret some as some but not all. On the basis of behavioral research, it has been suggested that processing implicatures is cognitively costly. However, many studies have used cases where sentences with some did not match the context in which t...

9 Grice’s (1975, 1989) theory of conversational implicatures is one of the most 10 celebrated contributions of the 20th century to the philosophy of language, 11 linguistics, and the neighboring disciplines. Contemporary theorizing of the 12 relationship between language and logic arguably relies as much on it as on 13 the works of Frege and Montague. Almost from the moment a wider academic 14 ...

An implicature i that arises from an utterance U is cancelable if U is consistent with not i. If i is a cancelable implicature, then it is a conversational implicature. However, some particularized conversational implicatures (PCIs) cannot straightforwardly be canceled. Imagine that Mr. X is applying for a philosophy position and his teacher is writing him the following letter of recommendation:

The notion of implicature was first introduced by Grice (1967, 1989), who defined it essentially as what is communicated less what is said. This definition contributed in part to the proliferation of a large number of different species of implicature by neo-Griceans. Relevance theorists have responded to this by proposing a shift back to the distinction between explicit and implicit meaning (co...

Linguistic communication relies on pragmatic implicatures such as the inference that if “some students passed the test,” not all did. Yet young children perform poorly on tests of implicature, especially scalar implicatures using “some” and “all,” until quite late in development. We investigate the origins of scalar implicature using tasks in which the scale arises from real-world context rathe...

This paper introduces Paul Grice’s notion of conversational implicature. The basic ideas — the cooperative principle, the maxims of conversation, and the contrast between implicature and presupposition — make it clear that conversational implicature is a highly contextualized form of language use that has a lot in common with non-linguistic behavior. But what exactly is its role? We invite the ...

You might try to argue that if the instructor is the target audience for your paper then you can omit facts because it is reasonable to assume that the person setting the assignment should be very familiar with all of the facts underlying their own questions. In reality, you are writing to convince the instructor that you have a clear understanding of the complexities of the question and that y...

The notion of implicature is not precisely defined, and may be compared to a concept with prototypical and peripheral instances. A prototypical implicature is a particularized conversational implicature as first proposed by Grice (1975), in which the implicature is intended by the speaker, dependent on the particular context of utterance, and calculated by identifiable inferential steps, includ...