Grice’s Theory of Implicature

Unlike many other topics in pragmatics, implicature does not have an extended history. The key ideas were proposed by Grice in the William James lectures delivered at Harvard in 1967 and still only partially published (Grice, 1975, 1978). The proposals were relatively brief and only suggestive of how future work might proceed.

The term implicature is used by Grice (1975) to account for what a speaker can imply, suggest, or mean, as distinct from what the speaker literally says. There are conventional implicatures which are, according to Grice, determined by ‘the conventional meaning of the words used’ (1975: 44). In the following example (1), the speaker doesn’t directly assert that one property (being brave) follows from another property (being an Englishman), but the form of expression used conventionally implicates that such a relation does hold.

If it should turn out that the individual in question is an Englishman and is not brave, then the implicature is mistaken, but the utterance, Grice suggests, need not be false. The same is true about the below statement.

Of much greater interest to the discourse analyst is the notion of conversational implicature.

There is no obvious conventional connection between the two statements (5A and 5B). But the speaker A is certainly hoping for one by asking his question. He is obviously looking for such connection, which is classed as a conversational implicature, or non-natural meaning or else meaning-nn in Grice's theory. According to Grice the latter, that is meaning-nn, or conversational implicature which is derived from a general principle of conversation plus a number of maxims which speakers will normally obey. The general principle is called Cooperative Principle which Grice (1975: 45) presents in the following terms: Make your conversational contribution such as is required, at the stage at which it occurs, by the accepted purpose or direction of the talk exchange in which you are engaged.

The conversational conventions, or maxims, which support this principle are as follows:

Quantity: make your contribution as informative as is required (for the current purposes of the exchange). Do not make your contribution more informative than is required.

Quality: Do not say what you believe to be false. Do not say that for which you lack adequate evidence.

Grice does nor suggest that this is an exhaustive list - he notes that a maxim such as Be polite is also normally observed - nor that equal weight should be attached to each of the stated maxims. (The maxim of manner, for example, does not obviously apply to primarily interactional conversation). We might observe that the instruction Be relevant covers all other instructions. However by providing a description of the norms speakers operate with in conversation Grice makes it possible to describe what types of meaning a speaker can convey by floating one of these maxims. This floating of a maxim results in the speaker conveying, in addition to the literal meaning of his utterance, an additional meaning, which is a conversational implicature. As a brief example we can consider the following exchange:

In this exchange Grice (1975:51) suggests that B would be infringing the instruction Be relevant if he was gratuitously stating a fact about the world via the literal meaning of his utterance. The implicature, derived from the assumption that speaker B is adhering to the Cooperative principle, is that the garage is not only round the corner, but also will be open and selling petrol. We might also note that, in order to arrive at the implicature, we have to know certain facts about the world, that garages sell petrol, and that round the corner is not a great distance away. We also have to interpret A’s remarks not only as a description of a particular state of affairs, but as a request for help, for instance. Once the analysis of intended meaning goes beyond the literal meaning of the ‘sentences-on-the-page’, a vast number of related issues have to be considered.

As a brief account of how the term ‘implicature’ is used in discourse analysis, we have summarised the important points in Grice’s proposal. We would like to emphases the fact that implicatures are pragmatic aspects of meaning and have certain identifiable characteristics. They are partially derived from the conventional or literal meaning of an utterance, produced in a specific context which is shared by the speaker and the hearer, and depend on a recognition by the speaker and the hearer of the Cooperative Principle and its maxims. For the analyst, as well as the hearer, conversational implicatures must be treated as inherently indeterminate since they derive from the supposition that the speaker has the intention of conveying meaning and of obeying the Cooperative Principle. Since the analyst has only limited access to what the speaker intended, or how sincerely he was behaving, in the production of a discourse fragment, any claims regarding the implicatures identified will have the status of interpretations. In this respect, the discourse analyst is not in the apparently secure position of the formal linguist who has ‘rules’ of the language which are or are not satisfied, but rather, in the position of the hearer who has interpretations of the discourse, which do, or do not, make sense. (For a more detailed treatment of conversational implicature see Levinson, 1983).

The first if these provides an explanation for ‘Moore’s paradox’, namely the unacceptability of utterances like the following:

This sentence is pragmatically anomalous because it contradicts the standard Quality implicature that one believes what one asserts. The example in (9) simply extends the scope of quality by viewing truth as a special sub-case of sincerity applied to assertions; when one asks a question, one may standardly be taken to be asking sincerely and hence to be indeed lacking and requiring the requested information. Normally then, in co-operative circumstances, when one asserts something one implicates that one believes it, when one asks a question one implicates that one sincerely desires an answer and, by extension, when one promises to do x, one implicates that one sincerely intends to do x, and so on. Any other use of such utterances is likely to be a spurious or counterfeit one, and thus liable to violate the maxim of Quality.

This maxim provides some of the most interesting of the standard implicatures. Suppose I say:

I shall implicate that Nigel has only fourteen children, although it would be compatible with the truth of (10) that Nigel in fact has twenty children. I shall be taken to implicate that he has only fourteen and no more because had he had twenty, then by the maxim of Quantity (‘say as much as it required’) I should have said so. Since I haven’t, I must intend to convey that Nigel has only fourteen. Similarly, consider the example below:

Since I have given no further information about other colours the flag may contain, which might indeed be highly relevant to the proceedings, I may be taken to implicate that the flag has no other colours and is thus wholly white. Or again suppose we overhear the following exchange:

If it later transpires, that Harry got a life sentence too, then B (if he knew this all along) would certainly be guilty of misleading A, for he has failed to provide all the information that might reasonably be required in the situation.

All these examples involve the first sub-maxim of Quantity, which appears to be the important one, in which the provision of full information is enjoined. The effect of the maxim is to add to most utterances a pragmatic inference to the effect that the statement presented is the strongest, or most informative, that can be made in the situation; in many cases the implicatures can be glossed by adding only to the prepositional content of the sentence, e.g. Nigel has only fourteen children; the flag is only white; Harry only got a fine.

The technical use of the term relevance in the analysis of conversation is derived from the conversational maxims proposed by Grice (1975). If, as Grice suggests, there is a general agreement of co-operation between participants in conversation, then each participant can expect the other to conform to certain conventions in speaking. These conventions or maxims have to do with the quantity (or informativeness), the quality (truthfulness), the manner (clearness) and relevance of conversational contributions. Although he discusses and exemplifies the other maxims, Grice does not elaborate on the simple instruction ‘Be relevant’. The discourse analyst wishing to make use of this notion is immediately confronted with the problem of deciding ‘relevant to what?’ One way of solving this problem is to translate the maxim ‘Be relevant’ into a more practically useful form as ‘Make your contribution relevant in terms of the existing topic framework.’

What we have characterised as a convention of conversational discourse –‘making your contribution relevant in terns of existing topic framework’ - could be captured more succinctly in the expression speaking topically. We could say that the discourse participant is ‘speaking topically’ when he makes his contribution fit closely to the most recent elements incorporated in the topic framework. This is most noticeable in conversations where each participant ‘picks up’ elements from the contribution of the preceding speaker and incorporates them in his contribution, as in the following fragment:

F: I have relations in California and that's their favourite Park because they... enjoy camping a lot.

This type of ‘speaking topically’ is an obvious feature of casual conversation in which each participant contributes equally and there is no fixed direction for the conversation to go. In contrast, there is the type of conversational situation in which the participants are concentrating their talk on one particular entity, individual or issue. In such a situation, the participants may, in fact, ‘speak topically’, but they might also be said to be speaking on a topic. An extreme example of ‘speaking on a topic’ would be in a debate where one participant ignored the previous speaker’s contribution on ‘capital punishment’, for example, and presented his talk quite independently of any connection with what went before. In practice, we should find that any conversational fragment will exhibit patterns of talk in which both ‘speaking topically’ and ‘speaking on a topic’ are present.

The maxim of relevance is responsible for producing a large range of standard implicatures. For example, where possible imperatives will be interpreted as relevant to the present interaction, and thus as requests to implement some action at the present time. Hence:

It is only on the basis of assuming the relevance of B’s response that we can understand it as providing a partial answer to A's question. The inference seems to work roughly like this: assume B's utterance is relevant; if it's relevant then given that A asked a question, B should be providing an answer; the only way one can reconcile the assumption that B is co-operatively answering A’s question with the content of B’s utterance is to assume that B is not in a position to provide the full information, but thinks that the milkman’s coming might provide A with the means of deriving a partial answer. Hence A may infer that B intends to convey that the time is at least after whenever the milkman normally calls. Below is yet another example:

Exactly similar inferences can be made in cases like example (16), and it is clear that such inferences are fundamental to our sense of coherence in discourse: if the implicatures were not constructed on the basis of the assumption of relevance, many adjacent utterances in conversation would appear quite unconnected.

Finally, a number of different kinds of inference arise from the assumption that the maxim of Manner is being observed. For example, by the third sub-maxim of Manner (‘be brief’), wherever I avoid some simple expression in favour of some more complex paraphrase, it may be assumed that I do not do so wantonly, but because the details are somehow relevant to the present enterprise.

If, instead of (17), I say (18), then I direct you to pay particular attention and care to each of the operations involved in doing (17), this being an implicature of the use of the longer expression:

18. Walk up to the door, turn the door handle clockwise as far as it will go, and then pull gently towards you.

But perhaps the most important of the sub-maxims of Manner is the fourth ‘be orderly’. For this can be used to explain the oddity of (19):

This violates our expectations that events are recounted in the order in which they happened. But it is just because participants in conversation may be expected to observe the sub-maxim ‘be orderly’ that we have that expectation. Presented with (20) we therefore read it as a sequence of two events that occurred in that order:

We now see how the semanticist armed with the notion of implicature can extricate himself from the dilemmas raised above. He need not claim that there are two words and in English, one meaning simply that both conjuncts are true, the other having the same meaning plus a notion of sequentiality. For the sequentiality, the ‘and then’ sense of and in sentences like (20), is simply a standard implicature due to the fourth sub-maxim of Manner, which provides a pragmatic overlay on the semantic content of and wherever descriptions of two events, which might be sequentially ordered, are conjoined.

Implicatures that are ‘triggered’ in this unostentatious way, simply by the assumption that the maxims are being observed, have so far been of the greater interest to linguists. This is because such inferences often arise wherever features of the context do not actually block them, with the result that they can be easily confused with the permanent aspects of the semantics of the expressions involved. Consequently, a semantic theory can become plagued by a proliferation of hypothetical senses and internal contradictions in ways we shall spell out below. Before returning to these implicatures in the next section, let us first illustrate the other major kind of implicatures that Grice had in mind.

The second kind of implicatures come about by overtly and blatantly not following some maxims, in order to exploit it for communicative purposes. Grice calls such usages floutings or exploitations of the maxims, and they can be seen to give rise to many of the traditional ‘figures of speech’. These inferences are based on the remarkable robustness of the assumption of co-operation: if someone drastically and dramatically deviates from maxim-type behaviour, then his utterances are still read as underlyingly co-operative, if this is at all possible. Thus by overtly infringing some maxim the speaker can force the hearer to do extensive inferencing to some set of propositions, such that if the speaker can be assumed to be conveying these then at least the over-arching co-operative principle would be sustained.

In fact, Grice has provided little more than a sketch of the large area and the numerous separate issues that might be illuminated by a fully worked out theory of conversational implicature (7, 118). So if use to be made of these ideas in a systematic way within linguistic theory, much has to be done to tighten up the concepts employed by Grice and to work out exactly how they apply to particular cases.

So far the theory though is of such broad scope, is basically too general. Yet even now it plays a principle role in linguistic theory, it is crucial for understanding communication, for the issues of the theory are universal. Really, if the maxims are derivable from conversations of rational cooperation, we should expect them to be universal in application at least in co-operative kinds of interaction.

Implicatures increase manifold the capacity of the signs to relate to meaning. They don’t need creation of new special signs. They are actually derived from

b) the assumption that at least the co-operative principle is being maintained. Thanks to them the comparatively limited number of signs can produce endless diversity of meanings and ways of their expression. Below are but some example of it:

In any case it is clear that implicature plays a major role in interactions as well as in language change, triggering both syntactic and semantic changes. Indeed it seems to be one of the single most important mechanisms whereby matters of language usage feed back into and affect matters of language structure. It is thus a major route for functional pressures and in general for communicative needs to leave their impact on the language [7, 166].

So the notion that pragmatics can be the study of aspects of meaning not covered in semantics certainly has some cogency. But we need to know how the broad sense of meaning, on which the definition relies, is to be delimited. This broad sense should include the ironic, metaphoric and implicit communicative content of an utterance, and so it can’t be restricted to the conventional content of what is said. But does it include all the inferences that can be made from a) what is said and b) all the available facts about the world known to participants? Suppose that Moriarty says that his watch broke, and from this Sherlock Holmes infers that he perpetrated the crime: although the information may have been indirectly conveyed, we should be loath to say that Moriarty communicated it. For communication involves the notions of intention and agency, and only those inferences that are openly intended to be conveyed can properly be said to have been communicated. To help us draw a line between the incidental transfer of information, and communication proper, we may appeal to an important idea of the philosopher Grice (1957). Distinguishing between what he calls natural meaning (as in These black clouds mean rain), and non-natural meaning or meaning-nn (equivalent to the notion of intentional communication), Grice gives the following characterization of meaning-nn:

Here, S stands for speaker (in the case of spoken communication; for sender or communicator in other cases); H for hearer, or more accurately, the intended recipient; ‘uttering U’ for utterance of a linguistic token, i.e. a sentence parts (or the production of non-linguistic communicative acts); and z for (roughly) some belief or volition invoked in H.

Such a definition is likely to be opaque at first reading, but what it essentially states is that communication consists of the ‘sender’ intending to cause the ‘receiver’ to think or do something, just by getting the ‘receiver’ to recognize that the ‘sender’ is trying to cause that thought or action. So communication is a complex kind of intention that is achieved or satisfied just by being recognized. In the process of communication, the ‘sender’s communicative intention’ becomes mutual knowledge to ‘sender’ (S) and ‘receiver’ (H), i.e. S knows that H knows that S knows that H knows (and so ad inflnitum) that S has this particular intention. Attaining this state of mutual knowledge of a communicative intention is to have successfully communicated. A simple illustration may help to clarify the concept: it distinguishes between two kinds of ‘boos’ or attempts to frighten someone.

Suppose I leap out from behind a tree, and by sheer surprise frighten you. I have caused an effect in you by ‘natural’ means. But now suppose that you know I am behind the tree, you are expecting me to leap out, and I know you know all that: I can still (maybe) frighten you by leaping out, just by getting you to realize that I intend to frighten you. Only the second is an instance of communication (meaning-nn) in Grice’s sense.

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