implicature: a standalone construct

H. P. Grice introduced conversational implicature in his 1967 William James Lectures, published as Logic and Conversation (1975), to name what a speaker suggests or means beyond the literal content of the words they utter. Grice held that people in conversation assume a Cooperative Principle and a small set of maxims (broadly: be truthful, be informative, be relevant, and be clear), and that a listener works out an implicature by reasoning about why a speaker would say what they did while apparently observing, or deliberately flouting, those maxims. For example, answering the question "Is there a gas station nearby?" with "There is one around the corner" conveys that the station is open and sells fuel, although none of that is literally stated. Stephen Levinson's 1983 Pragmatics systematised the Gricean account and its diagnostic tests, and the relevance theory of Dan Sperber and Deirdre Wilson later recast the inference as driven by a single expectation of relevance rather than a list of maxims. What makes implicature a landmark is that it separates what a sentence literally encodes from what a speaker conveys in a particular context, giving the study of language use a precise object that is distinct from semantic entailment.[1][2][3]

Unit

A speaker-meant proposition inferred in context, defeasible and not part of the literal content

Recovery means

Not applicable

Measured by

Identified by pragmatic diagnostics, chiefly cancellability (the implied content can be denied without contradiction), non-detachability, and reinforceability