Conversational Implicature 会话含义

    About conversational implicature the author may summarize it as a type of implied meaning, which is deduced on the basis of the conventional meaning of words together with the context, under the guidance of the Cooperative Principle and its maxims. In this sense, implicature is comparable to illocutionary force in speech act theory which aims to tell people what should do when using language in that they are both concerned with the contextual aspect of meaning, or 言外之意 in Chinese. And these two theories differ only in the mechanisms they offer for explaining the generation of contextual meaning. Toward the end of Grice’s “Logic and Conversation”, he mentioned briefly some characteristics of conversational implicature which were calculability, cancelability, non-detachability and non-conventionality. And a standard implicature is a conversational implicature based on an addressee’s assumption that the speaker is being cooperative by directly observing the conversational maxims.

Grice suggests there is a general pattern for the working out of a conversation implicature. That is, when somebody says something, which apparently does not make sense at the superficial level, the level of what is said, the hearer will not simply think that the speaker is talking nonsense and stop thinking about it any more. The hearer will instead try to find out its implied meaning at a deeper level. And if on the basis of every information available, there is one interpretation which may support the hearer previous assumptions, then the hearer will take it as the real point the speaker is trying to get across. For example:

A: Have you got any cash on you?

Here the speaker really wants the hearer to understand: “Can you lend me some money? I don’t have much on me.” The conversational implicature is a message that is not found in the literal sense of the sentence. The speaker expresses it in another way. The hearer has to read between the lines and infer this message in the utterance according to the rules governing successfully the conversational interaction.