Other Types of Conversational Implicature

Particularized and Generalized Conversational Implicatures

Among conversational implicatures, Grice distinguished between ‘particularized’ and ‘generalized’. The former are the implicatures that are generated by saying something in virtue of some particular features of the context, "cases in which there is no room for the idea that an implicature of this sort is normally carried by saying that p " [8, p. 37]. The above example of conversational implicature is, then, a case of particularized conversational implicature. A generalized conversational implicature occurs where "the use of a certain forms of words in an utterance would normally (in the absence of special circumstances) carry such-and-such an implicature or type of implicature" [8, p. 37]. Grice's first example is a sentence of the form "X is meeting a woman this evening." Anyone who utters this sentence, in absence of special circumstances, would be taken to implicate that the woman in question was someone other than X 's "wife, mother, sister, or perhaps even close platonic friend" [8, p. 37]. Being an implicature, it could be cancelled, either implicitly, in appropriate circumstances, or explicitly, adding some clause that implies its denial.

Particularized conversational implicatures have a wide range of applications that Grice himself illustrates: the informative use of tautologies, irony, metaphor, hyperbole, meiosis and, in principle, any kind of non-literal use that relies in special circumstances of the utterance can be explained in terms of them. But generalized conversational implicatures apply to philosophically more important issues, in particular, to what, according to the introduction to “ Logic and Conversation”, was Grice's most important motivation: the issue of the difference of meaning between logical constants of formal languages and their counterparts in natural languages, or the alleged meanings of verbs like ‘to look like,’ ‘to believe’ or ‘to know.’ Generalized conversational implicatures are also at the heart of Grice's Modified Occam's Razor (" Senses are not to be multiplied beyond necessity," [7, p. 47]), which has served as a criterion for distinguishing semantic issues from pragmatic uses and for preferring, in general, an explanation in terms of implicatures rather than a semantic one that postulates ambiguity.

1. The speaker deliberately flouts a conversational maxim to convey an additional meaning not expressed literally. For instance, a speaker responds to the question "How did you like the guest speaker?" with the following utterance: “ Well, I’m sure he was speaking English.” If the speaker is assumed to be following the cooperative principle, in spite of flouting the maxim of quantity, then the utterance must have an additional nonliteral meaning, such as: "The content of the speaker’s speech was confusing."

2. The speaker’s desire to fulfill two conflicting maxims results in his or her flouting one maxim to invoke the other. For instance, a speaker responds to the question "Where is John?" with the following utterance: “ He’s either in the cafeteria or in his office.” In this case, the maxim of quantity and the maxim of quality are in conflict. A cooperative speaker does not want to be ambiguous but also does not want to give false information by giving a specific answer in spite of his uncertainty. By flouting the maxim of quantity, the speaker invokes the maxim of quality, leading to the implicature that the speaker does not have the evidence to give a certain answer to where John is.

3. The speaker invokes a maxim as a basis for interpreting the utterance. In the following exchange: “Do you know where I can get some gas?” – “There’s a gas station around the corner.” The second speaker invokes the maxim of relevance, resulting in the implicature that “the gas station is open and one can probably get gas there”.

4. Scalar Implicature concerns the conventional uses of words like "all" or "some" in conversation. The sentence “I ate some of the pie” implies "I did not eat all of the pie." While the statement "I ate some pie" is still true if the entire pie was eaten, the conventional meaning of the word "some" and the implicature generated by the statement is "not all".

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