Implicature in Pragmatics/Discourse -- Conversational and Particularized

This video explains implicature and its kinds. “Implicature” denotes either (i) the act of meaning or implying one thing by saying something else, or (ii) the object of that act. Implicatures can be determined by sentence meaning or by conversational context and can be conventional (in different senses) or unconventional. Figures of speech such as metaphor and irony provide familiar examples, as do loose use and damning with faint praise. Implicature serves a variety of goals: communication, maintaining good social relations, misleading without lying, style, and verbal efficiency. Knowledge of common forms of implicature is acquired along with one’s native language. Conversational implicatures have become one of the principal subjects of pragmatics. An important conceptual and methodological issue in semantics is how to distinguish senses and entailments from generalized conversational implicatures. A related issue is the degree to which sentence meaning determines what is said. Historical linguistics traces the evolution of conversational implicatures into idioms. H. P. Grice (1913–1988) was the first to systematically study cases in which what a speaker means differs from what the sentence used by the speaker means. Consider (1). (1) Alan: Are you going to Paul’s party? Barb: I have to work. If this was a typical exchange, Barb meant that she is not going to Paul’s party by saying that she has to work. She did not say that she is not going to Paul’s party, and the sentence she uttered does not mean that. Grice introduced the technical terms implicate and implicature for the case in which what the speaker said is distinct from what the speaker thereby meant or implied. Thus Barb implicated that she is not going; that she is not going was her implicature. #Implicature_in_Pragmatics/Discourse #Conversational_and_Particularized