Implicature

by
Rifka Hayu Indraswari 17202244039
Muhammad Ammar Basith N 17202244030
Maulana Arif B 17202244043
Clara Sekar Pinayungan M.F 17202244034
Clara Straordinaria 17202244032
The Difference between Implicature and Entailment
Implicature

• “any meaning which

is conveyed indirectly
or through hints and
understood implicity
without ever being
explicitly stated.”
(Grundy: 2000,73)
Entailment

“a meaning that is
present on every
occasion when an
expression occurs.”
(Grundy: 2000,73)
Types of Implicature

Conversational
Implicature

Conventional
Implicature
 Conversational
Implicature

COOPERATION Hearer
The Coorperative Principle
The cooperative principle is a principle of conversation that was
proposed by Grice 1975, stating that participants expect that each
will make a “conversational contribution such as is required, at the
stage at which it occurs, by the accepted purpose or direction of
the talk exchange.”

The cooperative principle describes how people achieve effective

conversational communication in common social situations. That
is, how listeners and speaker act cooperatively and mutually
accept one another to be understood in particular way.

The cooperative principle is divided into four maxims of

conversation, called the Gricean maxims.
What is maxim?
The maxim of quantity

 Make your contribution as informative as is required for

the current purposses of the exchange
 Give appropriate amounts of information, not too little
and not too much
 Example :
(1) A : Are you at the office?
B : Yes, I am. You will see me at room 12 of Halley
building
(2) A : Are you from America?
B : No (followed by silence)
The maxim of quality

 Do not say what you believe to be false

 Do not say that for which you lack evidence
 Example
X to Y : The Greens will get more votes in the next election
Y to X : What’s the evidence of that?
Y to Z : X believes that, come election time, the Greens will
get more votes
Relevance maxim

 Be relevant
Example :
(1) A : Why do you learn English?
B : Yes, I learn it because of my hobby
(2) A : (picking up a book from a display in bookshop) Have
you read Long Walk to Freedom?
B : I find authobiographies fascinating)
Manner maxim

 Utterances should be clear: brief, orderly, and not

obsure
Example :
We bought a tandem bicyle and sold our car
Thise uterances has three possibilities : car sale before
tandem purchase, tandem purchase before car sale, or
selling a car and buying the tandem at the same time
This assumption can arise because this utterance doesn’t
have markers between the sequences like before, first, then,
and after.
Particularized
Implicature
 Definition

A particularized implicature is a People sometimes use utterance

01 conversational implicature that is
derivable only in a specific context.
Particularized conversations are the
interferences which are worked out
while drawing totally on the spesific
context of the utterance.
02 containing implicit meaning to
deliver the message in
communication.
Thomas (1996:1) states that
people do not always or even
usually say what they mean.

A particularized conversational
implicature is a follow-up in which a hearer first
03 04to make sense of an
attempt
utterance by recourse to the maxims alone;
if this fails, he resorts to
implicatures to determine its meaning and its
speaker's intention.
 Example
Conversation 1 :
01
A: “Wow!has your boss gonna crazy?”
B: “Let’s go get some coffee”
A has walked into B office
and noticed all the work is on
her desk. She has adressed B
without realizing that the
boss is in some corner in the
office.
Conversation 2:
02
A: “Where is my book?”
B: “Your young sister is
drawing something.”
The action “draw” of young sister
would ordinarily not conver anything
about her book, so implicature in this
case depens on the context as well as
the utterance itself
Generalized Implicature
 Definition

Is a conversational implicature that is

inferable without reference to a special
context
(No special knowledge is required to
figure out the additional meaning)

A generalized conversational
implicature is one which does not
depen on particular features of the
context, but is instead typically
associated with the proposition
expressed.
 The key principles of Generalized

Heuristic 1 Heuristic 2 Heuristic 3

The first heuristic is called
What is not What is said in a What is said Quantity Principle (Q-
said, is not simple way is in an Principle). The second
the case stereotypically abnormal way, heuristic is called
exemplified is not in a Informativeness Principle (I-
normal Principle). The last heuristic
situation is called Manner Principle
(M-Principle).
Example
Speaker : Markus said ‘Hello’ to the secretary and then
he smiled. A
Hearer : ‘Markus said “Hello” to the female secretary
and then Marcus smiled.’

In the example above, speaker said “secretary” which

has minimal information about the gender, therefore
hearer will assume that the gender of the secretary is
female, because as we know, most of the secretary
Speaker : He caused his car to stop.
are woman. C
Hearer : ‘He stopped his car with an unusual way (for
example: he bumped his car to a tree).’

The utterance indicates an unusual situation of the

way to stop the car. As we know, the normal way to
stop the car is by stepping the breaks, and the
utterances will be ‘he stop his car’.

By saying ‘he caused his car to stop’, hearer will

assume that speaker’s utterance has an intended
meaning, like ‘he bumped the car to a tree’.
Conventional Implicature

Conventional implicature :
Such detachable but non-cancelable aspects of meaning
that are neither part of, nor calculable from what is said
(Stalnaker 1974).
Independent from the cooperative principles and the
four maxims.
Tied to the conventional meaning of certain phrases suc
h as but, however, even, yet, after, etc.
Example

Example :
• She locked the door, and left the house.
p q
Means : After she locked the door, she left the
house. (q after p)
• Jones dressess well and writes grammatical English.
p q
Means : Jones both dressess well and writes grammatical
English. (p plus q)

• John is poor but happy.

p q
Means : In contrast to what John should feel as a poor
person, he is happy. (p is in contrast to q)
• Adam isn’t come yet.
not p

Means : Adam is expected to come later. (Not p

is expected to be true later)

• Even Mary come the party.

p
Means : Contrary to what is expected.
Reference:

1. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Implicature

2. https://www.slideshare.net/mariambedraoui/implicature-15555543

3. https://www.slideshare.net/snbal/cooperative-principle-10643777

4. https://www.cambridge.org/core/search?filters[keywords]=generalized%20conversational%20i
mplicatures

5. https://www.slideshare.net/mariambedraoui/implicature-15555543